Only those people who know how a pressure cooker works, appreciate that it’s the most efficient way to cook and present food when time’s a luxury. Your pressure cooker spares your mistake of not soaking the beans before cooking. It can hide your problem of making thin soups by giving it just the thickness it deserves. It can even deal with stubborn vegetables and make them tender.
A pressure cooker is a smart and inexpensive way to say “Hello” to cooking. Even a novice can learn how to cook, and that’s what chefs hate about it so much!
Pressure cookers help save energy. Where you spend the entire day simmering and soaking some of the food items, pressure cookers can save your time and energy and get the whole thing done before you know it.
What else? Oh, yes! Pressure cookers cook delicious and moist meals. So, if you’re fed up with your oven for drying things out, let this steam celebrating device take up the job! And it will never disappoint you.
Well, this post is all about the incredible things your pressure cooker can do. With so many things mentioned already, there’s still a long way to go.
Here’s something you haven’t tried with your amazing cooking tool – five incredible things that you thought only a slow cooker would do. Let’s see if a pressure cooker can really do anything else besides cooking vegetables, rice, meat or soup.
1. Vegetable Stock
Do you love homemade stock? It’s great; just save all those leftover raw veggies and fruits before this process. You can begin with a quick DIY vegetable stock. Sounds nice!
- There are no specific ingredients that must be added or avoided. You can collect garlic ends, celery leaves, onion skins, carrot tops or whatever’s available.
- Put all the stuff in your pressure cooker and add spices and other herbs according to your liking.
- Now, fill the water into the pot until it tops the vegetables.
- Now, allow the whole thing to pressure cook for ten minutes.
- Finally, you need to strain the vegetables and the remaining liquid will make a seasoned stock.
You can freeze the stock in ice cube trays, or you can refrigerate it to reuse in three to four days. Whenever you have a recipe that requires seasoning or liquids, you can save time by adding the stock. Or you can give a unique flavor to the recipe with your vegetable stock.
2. Beans
If you’ve gotten bored with those canned beans loaded with sodium, you can choose to make your own with the help of your pressure cooker. It’s worth mentioning that there’s no better way to cook beans than pressure cooking.
Initial preparation can take a day or two because you have to soak the beans before finally putting them into the pot for cooking. Even then, these stubborn legumes take two to three hours to prepare in ordinary cookware.
With pressure cookers, beans can cook in less than half an hour, twenty minutes to be precise. (Don’t forget to soak your beans to remove gases.) The best part comes when beans are pressurized. During this entire period, they are packed with flavor.
It depends on upon the ingredients you’ve added. You can put herbs, spices, a little amount of salt, and anything else for flavor because these things will meld together and give you astoundingly delicious beans in the end.
If you keep on practicing, you’ll figure out the amount of time and liquid required to cook each of the following:
- Mushy beans
- Whole beans, or
- Bean soup
3. Delicious Stew
A well-trained chef or home cook knows that the core element of a good stew is its broth. The quality of broth depends on two things:
- Amount of flavor in it
- Its thickness
Luckily, your pressure cooker has the capability to infuse both qualities into the broth. It helps the flavor to move inside the stew and squeezes the starches out and into the sauce.
You can use potatoes, carrots, sweet potatoes and other starchy root veggies to prepare delicious sauce that will soak up the flavor you’ve added. Now, you just need to mix some beans and veggies, and the stew is ready to be served!
4. Caramelized Vegetables
The pressure cooker has a quality to moisturize food instead of zapping it. This characteristic can be utilized to prepare awesome caramelized onions and other root vegetables without burning them.
Roasting vegetables is a tricky job because we need the intense flavor from them, and pressure cookers are quite efficient in extracting that flavor. It generates a high amount of heat but simultaneously prevents them from burning by keeping them moist.
In about twenty minutes, you can get the caramelized vegetables on the table, instead of waiting for them to roast for hours inside the oven. Pressure cookers do the job in a way that does not dry out the vegetables.
You can use these vegetables in soup and make your own carrot soup or French onion soup.
5. Jellies and Jams
You like jams, but you don’t have time to prepare your own version. It’s quite true because jams and jellies take hours of simmering and you need to be present all the time. That’s not the case with pressure cookers.
A pressure cooker has that amazing ability to break down fruits quickly. Even the hard and resistant bases of pears and apples can’t stand a chance.
What exactly happens inside, is the heat remains low so the juices don’t get enough heat to escape. Therefore, the end product will have balanced sugar. You should try DIY jams in your pressure cooker. They’re quite fast.
Finally
Now that you have five awesome ways to utilize your pressure cooker, you can begin a new journey to explore the hidden talents of this amazing device. There is a wide range of choices waiting for you, such as sauces, soups, sides, desserts and rice dishes. So, come out of your comfort zone and throw some new challenges at your pressure cooker!
More reading: Find the best rice cookers in 2016 for your daily rice cooking.
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