Benefits of Cooking with a Pressure Cooker Longridge

Cooking with a Pressure Cooker is Cheap and Easy

If you have not cooked with a modern pressure cooker before, you are in for a treat.

Cooking with a pressure cooker is easy, fast and cost-effective.

This page gives some of the advantages of cooking with a pressure cooker from a green living perspective and explores some of the types of cookery for which pressure cookers are suitable. There's also a recipe for delicious Lancashire Hot Pot!

Savings!

Incredibly, you can save as much as a two-thirds of your normal cooking fuel and you can save a similar amount of time for each dish cooked.

Using a pressure cooker for your cooking is a very green option because of the fuel savings you will achieve. Gas and electric cookers alike contribute significant carbon-dioxide emissions. These are emitted during combustion for gas and during production for electricity.

And of course you will shave your fuel money down considerably. Pity you cannot use them to grill!

If you haven't yet bought a pressure cooker, there are some good options.

See also for tips on what's best to buy.

Some advantages of pressure cooker cookery

One of the delights of cooking with a pressure cooker is that it allows you to tackle recipes which would otherwise be off-putting because of the length of time involved. Stews and even steamed puddings become a possibility, even in the most time-conscious homes.

Modern pressure cookers are user-friendly and don't require constant attention. Set them up correctly and you can go and get on with other things, for the most part.

Using cheap cuts of meat

If you like to use top quality in your green living diet, a pressure cooker is a great asset because it enables you to use some of the cheap cuts of meat to make flavoursome stews and casseroles. Cooking with a pressure cooker lets you get every ounce of flavour and goodness out of the ingredients.

You can also make stocks for use in other recipes. Use the bones from cuts of meat or chicken to produce wonderful stocks which can be added to soups and other dishes to provide more nutrition and flavour.

Another way to use your pressure cooker to good effect is to make puddings which would otherwise require steaming for a long time.

Nutritional benefits

When cooking with a pressure cooker you retain more of the natural vitamin content of the food. This is because the food cooks for a shorter length of time, though at higher temperatures.

This is especially useful when cooking vegetables, as in conventional boiling a lot of the vitamin content is destroyed.

Your pressure cooker can be used to steam vegetables which preserves more of the vitamin and mineral content.

Most pressure cookers have trivets for steaming as part of the equipment.

Pressure cooker recipes

Most of the can be adapted for cooking with a pressure cooker. Adjust the times to suit. For most dishes you will need from 1/4 to 1/3 of the cooking time.

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