I just saw a recipe calling to use a pressure cooker. Can anyone explain what it does?!
I just saw a recipe calling to use a pressure cooker. Can anyone explain what it does?
It was a recipe for a black bean and corn salad. It told you to put the dried beans in a pressure cooker for so many minutes.
Answers:
A pressure cooker uses a tightly sealed lid and a weight controlled valve to increase the temperature of cooking by raising the pressure inside the pot. They come in various sizes and are used for cooking and canning. Before microwaves, they were a primary way of speeding up cooking and are especially good when things would require long slow cooking - like beans and tough roasts or birds - to be tender. They are also really helpful at high altitudes.
They are slightly dangerous as they increase the pressure and thus can explode and the steam coming off is higher than 212F. With beans, all kinds of warnings are given to keep the beans from getting in the vent.
We have two and use the smaller one fairly often.