Pamela Rice Hahn - The Everything Pressure Cooker Cookbook

THE PRESSURE COOKER MAKES it possible for you to prepare great-tasting food in ways that save you time and effort.

Pressure cookers aren't a new phenomena. In fact, pressure cookers were especially popular in the 1950s. Back in those days, the typical pressure cooker had a noisy rocking pressure valve on the lid. But because a pressure cooker didn't have an emergency mechanism in place to prevent the cooker from building up too much pressure, it had the tendency to have accidents. Those accidents forced the food inside the pressure cooker out. In other words, that sizzling hot food became sloppy, hot, airborne projectiles. Therefore, while it may not be technically correct to say that the pressure cooker would explode, the accident pretty much amounted to the same result. It's bad enough that you have to wash the dishes after you fix a meal; you don't want to have to wash gunk off of the ceiling, walls, and floors, too.

As you'll learn in Chapter 1, today's new generation of pressure cookers are much safer and easier to use. You'll find evidence of that when you take a quick look at this book. When you do, you'll see that there are recipes for food that can take you from breakfast to lunch to dinner. You can also make snacks, desserts, and dishes for special occasions.

While every effort was made to create foolproof recipes for this book, it's impossible to anticipate every factor that can affect cooking times. For example, a pressure cooker filled with cold, dense food is going to take longer to come to pressure than one that has room temperature or warm food. Regardless of the cooking method, ingredients at room temperature will cook faster than those just out of the refrigerator, and even faster than those fresh from the freezer. Granted, with the exception of some uses for the microwave oven, any food will cook faster in a pressure cooker than it will using any other method. But because it's impossible to predict the overall temperature of the food in all situations when it goes into the pressure cooker, overall cooking times aren't given. In other words, while each recipe will explain how long the food should remain at pressure, it won't state how long it will take that food to come to pressure, because it's impossible to predict.