For Cheaper, Better Meals, Try A Pressure Cooker

With today’s busy lifestyles and budget crunches, using a pressure cooker is a great way to make meals in a hurry. It's great for fixing healthier foods due to the fact it preserves the flavors and nutrients, and it can tenderize leaner cuts of meat. As an added bonus, it cooks foods three to ten times faster than ordinary methods. Some foods, in fact, cook even more quickly in a pressure cooker than they do in a microwave!

Safety Comes First!

If you’ve put off buying a pressure cooker because of safety concerns, take another look at the pressure cooker. Improved designs of today's pressure cookers means that have not just one safety feature, but sometimes up to three safety devices to prevent accidents. If you follow the cooking and safety procedures outlined in the manual that comes with your nice new pressure cooker, you probably have more chance of accidentally burning yourself on a hot pan coming out of the oven than having a problem with the pressure cooker.

Just keep in mind the main rule of pressure cooking - never, ever open the cooker while it is still under pressure!

Reasons To Have A Pressure Cooker

For healthy cooking on a budget, a nice new pressure cooker is a great investment. With a minimum of care, it can last through many years of hard service. Some of the advantages of using a pressure cooker include:

• Using less energy because it takes less time for foods to cook, saving money and energy resources.
• Pressure cookers work at all altitudes. All that's needed is to adjsut the amount of pressure and cooking times.
• An entire meal can be quickly cooked in one pot by using a rack to enable cooking a variety of foods.
• It saves money by tenderizing budget meat cuts, and saves time by cooking food so quickly.
• Because foods cook quickly with so little liquid in an airtight environment, the nutrients are preserved.

Not only is a pressure cooker great for meals, but it’s bigger cousin, the pressure canner, is absolutely essential for canning many vegetables and meats.

Choosing The Right Pressure Cooker

One of the first decisions is whether you want an aluminum or a stainless steel pressure cooker. Aluminum pressure cookers are more lightweight and more economical to buy. These types are good conductors of heat. Unlike most other aluminum cookware, however, pressure cookers aren't availalbe with nonstick coatings. These types of finishes just don't last in the conditions inside a pressure cooker.

Although more expensive than aluminum, stainless steel pressure cookers are also heavier. However, they have the same long lasting, lustrous finish common to most stainless steel cookware. Stainless steel is a poor conductor of heat however, so choose one with a bimetal base to improve cooking performance.

Different Size Pressure Cookers Available.

Pressure cookers are generally sold by their total liquid capacity. However, depending on what food is being cooked, in reality you can only use half to two thirds of their total liquid capacity. The most commonly available models come in the following sizes:

• 4-quart: This is a good size for a single person or couple. An entire meal for 1-2 people can be cooked in this size, but it would likely only have room for a single course for a bigger family, such as vegetables.
• 6-quart: A great size for families, this is probably the most popular sized model for cooking.
• 8-quart: For bigger families, this size works best. This size can also be used for pressure canning pint and half-pint jars.

Larger pressure cookers, such as the 17 or 22 quart models, are generally referred to and used as pressure canners. It would take a large group of people to warrant pressure cooking in such a large size.

A High Pressure Kitchen!

A pressure cooker is a great addition in today's kitchens. It helps the budget, makes meal preparation convenient, and preserves the nutritents in foods. Using a pressure cooker makes being under pressure a good thing!