We love the pressure cooker
Yay or passé? It’s a clunky thing that your grandma might still have or that is gathering dust in your home. As far as we’re concerned, it can stick around for a while longer: the pressure cooker. Also known as the good old pressure cooker or high-pressure cooker.
Slow food, fast
The main advantage of the pressure cooker is that it produces a comparable result super quickly to when your highly coveted veal cheeks have been simmering in a pan for hours. This is because the ingredients are prepared under high pressure and at a high temperature (up to approx. 120°C). It can save you more than half of the cooking time in total.
Stock
Do you never make your own chicken stock because it has to simmer for hours and you don’t feel like it? Forty-five minutes in the pressure cooker is enough for a delicious home made broth that is a hundred times tastier than any stock cube. Tip: reduce it and then freeze it in an ice cube tray. That way you have homemade stock cubes.
Money, money
Because of the shorter cooking time, cooking with a pressure cooker is more economical than cooking with a regular pan. Since the temperature in the pan becomes very high due to the pressure, it’s best to cook over a low heat. This means you need up to two-thirds less gas or electricity to prepare a dish, and that saves you money.
Super easy
It’s a very simple way of cooking that really requires no skills. You can simply put all the ingredients together in a pan, place it on the heat and then don’t have to worry about it for a while. Do make sure you add enough liquid so it doesn’t burn (too much is better than too little), because it’s not possible to stir the contents of the pan in the meantime.
Very little washing up
Putting all the ingredients in one pan not only makes cooking very easy, but also means you have very little washing up to do. There are plenty of models on the market these days where both the pan and the lid are dishwasher-safe. So you don’t even have to make an effort to clean that one pan.
Won’t it explode?
Some people are afraid that the pan might explode or that they could burn themselves on the steam. Fortunately, almost all the latest models have a safe pressure valve from which the steam escapes automatically when there is too much pressure. It is also impossible to open the lid on these new models when the pan is under high pressure. Is the cooking time up? Let the pan cool down for fifteen minutes so the steam can escape automatically. You can then safely open it.
