How to create faster, healthier, tastier meals with pressure cooking! It's the way to cook today!

Once it was a simple matter to find a favorite recipe and prepare a meal. Not so today. Now family taste preferences have to be carefully balanced with concerns about health, nutrition, and food safety. And in meal preparation, technique often has to take a backseat to convenience and speed.

Fortunately for contemporary cooks, pressure cooking hasn't changed. It may have been invented over 300 years ago, but pressure cooking is definitely the cooking method for today. When the pressure is on to eat right, you can't cook healthier, tastier, or faster than in the pressure cooker. Flavorful meals featuring fresh vegetables, rice, and legumes cook to perfection in minutes. Plus, pressure cooking makes it easy for even the busiest cooks to prepare meals from scratch and take advantage of the "fresh is best" philosophy of cooking.

The pressure cooker . . .

Saves Time:
Foods cook three to ten times faster than with ordinary cooking methods.

Saves Money:
Superfast cooking means lower fuel bills and more for your money at the supermarket. It preserves the flavors, colors and valuable nutrients of the foods you buy, plus it turns budget cuts of meat into tender, tasty meals.

Saves Nutrients:
Because foods cook quickly in an almost airless environment with just a little liquid, precious vitamins and minerals aren't boiled away.

Saves Work:
Convenience and versatility mean you can prepare everything from a simple entree to a complete gourmet meal in minutes.

Saves Energy:
It's even good for the environment, because reduced cooking times conserve energy.

And it's simple, too!

Here's how pressure cooking works. When water (or any liquid) boils, it produces steam. A tightly-sealed pressure cooker traps this steam, which then builds pressure inside the cooker. Under pressure, cooking temperatures can be raised significantly higher than possible under normal conditions. The super-heated steam created by these higher temperatures cooks foods quickly, evenly, deliciously. It's that simple!

Getting to know your Pressure Cooker...

Since all pressure cookers work on this same simple principle, there are few fundamental differences among them. The following diagram illustrates the basic features of most newer pressure cookers. Of course, you'll also want to study your own model and get acquainted with exactly how it works.

PRESSURE REGULATOR
Controls and maintains pressure inside the cooker and indicates when the ideal cooking pressure - usually 15 pounds - is reached.

VENT PIPE
The pressure regulator fits on the vent pipe and allows excess pressure to be released.

SEALING RING
Forms a pressure-tight seal between the cover and the pressure cooker body during cooking.

For a simple step-by-step guide to using a pressure cooker, go to the Pressure Cooking Method section and discover how easy pressure cooking can be.