Pressure cooking rules; Always brown off large pieces of meat and vegetables separately before adding any stock. All my recipes cooking times start once you get to full pressure.
Pressure cooking has come a long way since the scraping the pea and ham soup from the ceiling. They have become of age from .750 bars of pressure to 1.5 bars of pressure everything cooks in half the time as the old ones. If you look at how pressure cooker work in relation to the environment for example, it uses a little amount of energy, recycles all flavor cooking juices and cooks inexpensive food quickly while retaining all of the natural minerals while it cooks. The natural flavors that pressure cookers produces is where this style of cooking stands on it's own. What it takes to cook a conventional braise is like 2 to 3 hours of slow cooking but a pressure cooker will have it done in 45 minutes to 1 hour. At the end of the cooking process using both methods there's no difference in the dishes out come.
Now if you haven't got a pressure cooker is like not having a wok or good cooks knife in your kitchen. With today's technology pressure cookers are probably the safest cooking utensil in the kitchen. With safety features like; excess pressure release valves, pressure integrator with all new pressures cookers "the cook" has all the control, and it's all in the taste and texture of the food that makes pressure cooking the complete 1 pot meal maker. I've been teaching pressure cooking classes for 5 years and swear by them and many of students as well. All my recipes are designed to minimizes cooking times with good preparation method and step by step instructions. As a "on the go" working chef my time cooking at home wouldn't take long for me to whip a chicken curry or a toasted pumpkin soup, in my trusty pressure cooker.
Chef Dale Sniffen
