Forget whatever horror stories you heard about your olden style pressure cookers. For time saving, flavor and nutrition no cooking method beats today's safe and reliable pressure cookers. You can get home at 6:00 and have a complete, fresh, homecooked meal on the table by 6:30 or even earlier. Once you've started using pressure cookers, you will find they beat the meals made in microwaves hands down. Here's the science bit of how a pressure cooker works. The cover or lid locks in place creating a closed system at a standard 15 pounds of pressure. At this pressure water boils at 257 degrees F instead of the usual 212 degrees F. The higher temperature reduces the cooking time. About three times faster than regular stove top cooking methods. Small to medium-sized potatoes cook in five minutes, and a whole "roast" chicken dinner cooks in only twenty minutes. In addition, foods keep their flavor better when pressure cooked. Nutrients stay trapped in the pot instead of dissipating in a cloud of steam. For family use the Kuhn Rikon 7 liter stainless steel pressure cooker is the gold standard. An aluminum disk in the base, sandwiched by stainless steel, cooks evenly on gas, electric, ceramic and induction stovetops. In addition, it has modern safety features that steadily regulate the pressure of the pot while it cooks. Presto pressure cookers have been around for a long time and offer a variety of different sized stainless steel and aluminum pots. Professional chefs prefer a stainless pressure cooker because it is nonreactive and can be safely cleaned in a dishwasher, but aluminum is also a good choice if weight is a consideration. You want heat resistant double handles, one on each side of the pot, in every case. Families don't really need anything larger than a 6 quart pressure cooker. Go larger if you will use it as a canner. You are better off sticking with a well-known brand manufacturer even when price is your primary consideration. Quality control is likely to be better but more importantly you want to be able to get replacement parts when you need them five or ten years from now. Small things such as valves and new seals on the lid can make the difference between your pressure cooker working properly and not working at all. Most pressure cooker models come with baskets, and racks so that you can place several items into the cooker at once. If you brown meat before placing it into the pressure cooker, some of the food will stick to the pot. You may still want to avoid nonstick interiors, however. The occasional inconvenience of a little extra cleaning far outweighs the risk of a pitted or peeling interior coating. Nonstick interiors are less of a potential problem with electric pressure cookers. A good medium priced pressure cooker is the Cuisinart programmable pressure cooker. In terms of price, it's half-way between the Kuhn pressure cooker and Presto's cheaper offerings. The Cuisnart can be programmed for high or low pressure cooking, browning, simmering, sauteing or warming. And you got to admit that an electronic thermostat is more foolproof than setting a stovetop control to a precise position. You do give up some flexibility, however, because you can't open the lid until the cooker says you can. By contrast with stovetop pressure cookers, you can decide when to drop the pressure by putting the pot under cold water.
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