Pressure Cooker Cookbook: Super Easy Recipes for Fast & Healthy Meals

By Robert McGowan

Do you want to save time cooking delicious and healthy meals on any budget?

In this cookbook you will discover:

• Super easy to follow instructions to get the most from your Pressure Cooker
• THE best tried and tested recipes your whole family will love
• Quick and easy recipes for people who do not have time to cook
• Recipes for any occasion, any guest and any budget
• Nutritional facts at a glance
• The ultimate 14-day Pressure Cooker meal plan
• Easy to follow guide to guarantee your perfect results every single time
• Detailed and simple ingredient lists
• Insider tips and secrets to ensure your savory, sweet and spicy success

Take the pressure out of pressure cooking. From breakfast to dessert, discover how your Electric Pressure Cooker can make every meal perfect, every time. You will also learn exactly how to use and care for your Electric Pressure Cooker the easy way. Ideal for complete beginners or experienced enthusiasts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alice Winter
• Release date: Jul 22, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393577140

Book preview

Part One

Chapter 1: Startup Guide

Using an Instant Pot, or another electric pressure cooker may seem a bit daunting in the beginning. They have many features and buttons that perhaps you aren’t aware of. Thankfully, with a little knowledge and practice, you will find that these devices are easy to use, and they can make your life so much easier!

Unlike the more dangerous stove-top pressure cookers, the Instant Pot is safe to use and includes a lot of handier features. Depending on the model you have, an Instant Pot can perform tasks such as pressure cooking, rice cooking, slow cooking, sautéing, steaming, warming, and even a yogurt setting! There are also many pre-programmed settings for various dishes, such as meats, soups, and beans.

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A basic Instant Pot should contain:

The Base Unit: this is the main body of the device and it contains the heating element and the computerized settings.

Lid: The lid locks onto the base and contains various parts that enable it to function.

Steam Valve: this valve attaches onto the lid and either locks in or releases steam, based on if it turned in the on or off direction.

Inner Pot: this is a stainless-steel pot that fits inside the base unit.

Powder Cord: this three-pronged cord is removable in certain models.

Condensation Collection Cup: while not all models have this, for those that do it is attached to the edge of the pot and will collect any condensation that escapes.

Trivet: this is a metal wire rack that you can place food on.

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The electric pressure cooker is much safer than the stove-top manual varieties that you may remember from your childhood. However, there are a couple of safety instructions you will need to remember. To get to grips with everything that you should watch out for, you should always read the user’s manual for your brand of cooker. There are two main generic issues that you will want to keep in mind.

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1: Keep Away from the Steam

Obviously, the steam is very hot and could potentially scald a person. Most steam will be released from the cooker through the valve while it is building up the pressure and while it is releasing pressure. For this reason, keep any skin (mainly your hands and face) away from this steam while cooking and releasing pressure. One way you can do this is by using a kitchen utensil to switch the steam release valve after cooking. This will allow you to quick release the pressure, without getting near the steam. You may also use an oven mitt, but please keep in mind that these are often not water resistant.

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2: Never Open a Sealed Pressure Cooker

Never try to open a pressure cooker that is sealed with pressure. Thankfully, the Instant Pot and several other brands automatically lock under pressure. Although, there are ways in which you can trick or override the Instant Pot into believing that all the steam has been released when it hasn’t. You should never do this. It is incredibly dangerous to open something that is under so much pressure. Always wait for the pin in the release valve to drop naturally, signaling that there is no longer any pressure built up.

Using an Instant Pot is quite easy. But, the number of options and buttons may be confusing to a new user. Thankfully, once you get started using it you will find that it is user friendly and the more you use it the easier it becomes. Pretty soon it will be second nature to you, and you’ll have forgotten how unsure you were when you first started using it. Let’s look at some of the functions.

Button Functions:

Manual and Pressure Cook: These two buttons mean the same thing but may appear differently depending on the model you have. With these buttons, you can use a basic pressure-cooking cycle with adjustable settings.

Keep Warm/Cancel: You can use this button to either cancel a cooking program or turn the warming function on. When your Instant Pot is done cooking, it will automatically switch to warming.

Plus and Minus: the plus and minus buttons, shown in their symbol form, can be used to adjust the cooking time.

Adjust: this button allows you to switch between cooking modes and temperatures, known as normal, less and more. This can be especially helpful when using the sauté function.

Pressure: the pressure button allows you to switch between high and low pressure. Most recipes will call for high pressure when cooking, but there is the occasional recipe that may use low pressure. This button is not available on all models so please check your model.

Sauté: the sauté button allows you to use the cooker as a skillet, sautéing vegetables, searing meats, thickening sauces and gravies, and more. The sauté function automatically lasts thirty minutes, but you can turn it off or back on at any point.

Program Buttons: these buttons change depending on the model of pressure cooker you have. Often these buttons include Steam, Rice, Slow Cook, Soup/Broth, Meat/Stew, Bean/Chili, Multigrain, Porridge, and Yogurt.

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Tips and Tricks:

Minimum Liquid Requirements: generally, you are unable to cook without liquid in the cooker, as steam is what is used to build pressure. If a recipe doesn’t call for liquid, then you can follow what it states. Otherwise, you will want to use a minimum of one cup of liquid.

Fill Level: if you overly full the device it will be unable to rise to the correct pressure level, or the food (such as rice and beans) will expand during cooking and potentially damage your pressure cooker. Inside the stainless-steel liner, there are markings for half-full and two-thirds-full. You never want to fill the Instant Pot more than the two-thirds line. On the other hand, ingredients that expand during cooking, such as pasta, grains, and beans, shouldn’t be filled to over the halfway line.

Trivet: the trivet is used when you don’t want your food to touch the bottom of the pan. This can be helpful for when you want to cook something such as a dessert or roasted chicken and need liquid in order to build pressure, but don’t want to cook in the liquid.

Check the Sealing: every time you use the cooker you want to look it over to ensure that the lid is properly locked in place and that it is fully sealed. In order to seal the device, you need to check both that the silicone seal is secure on the inside portion of the lid, and that the steam valve is positioned correctly. In order to build steam, you need your valve to be in the sealing position rather than the release position.

Cooking Time: keep in mind that the cooking time of a recipe is not the total time it takes to prepare. This is because, before your Instant Pot starts the cooking process, it must attain full pressure. The time it takes to build pressure varies based on the size of your Instant Pot, the amount of liquid, and the amount of food inside. Some recipes also require either a natural release (which takes longer) or a quick release. Remember to factor this into the equation while cooking.

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Woman uses pressure cooker to cook a meal. — Stock Photo

Chapter 2: Benefits of Using the Instant Pot

There are many benefits to using electric pressure cookers, and specifically the Instant Pot. In this chapter, we will look over some of those benefits to give you a better understanding of how to get the best from your cooker.

Retain Nutrients within Food:

Many forms of cooking, especially boiling and even steaming can cause many nutrients to escape from the food being cooked. This decreases the nutritional quality of the food you are eating, making those vegetables much less nutritionally beneficial than you hoped. But, it’s not just vegetables. Even meats and grains contain nutrients that may escape with some forms of cooking. Cooking with pressure is different. It has been shown that by cooking food under pressure you can prevent this loss of nutrients by up to ninety percent! This little benefit alone will ensure that you will ingest the most vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and macro nutrients from your food as opposed to it being cooked out beforehand.

More Flavorful Food:

With a pressure cooker, you can both evenly and deeply cook your food. This is even been further improved over the older models of traditional manual pressure cookers, as the electric varieties contain microprocessors which allow more even and precise cooking. As the food is tightly sealed in an air-tight pressurized environment it can help every ingredient retain its texture, flavor and aroma. This means tastier food! While meats can often become tough when cooking, resulting in a chewy dish, you will find that the Instant Pot allows you to attain that much sought-after melt-in-your-mouth texture. Pressure cooking helps intramuscular fat and tough proteins to break down in a quick and optimal way, which is much harder to attain with other methods of cooking. Similarly, beans and legumes can easily be cooked quickly, even without first soaking overnight.

Save Time and Energy:

The electric pressure cooker is incredibly energy efficient. It is much more energy efficient than ovens and stovetops. The pressure cooker actually ranks second only to the microwave. This is for two reasons; firstly, as the inner pot of the Instant Pot is fully insulated it doesn’t take as much energy to heat up and stay at temperature. Secondly, since the Instant Pot requires much less water than other forms of cooking, it can heat up more quickly.

When compared with other forms of cooking, pressure cooking has been shown to reduce both cooking time and energy by up to seventy percent.

Kill Harmful Microorganisms:

The pressure cooker can boil water at a higher temperature than would otherwise be possible. Due to the unique nature of pressure cooking, you are able to attain temperatures of two-hundred and twelve degrees Fahrenheit. This heat allows the cooker to kill harmful bacteria, which might otherwise infect your food and make you sick. Some people use this ability of the Instant Pot to kill off any toxins within the water to make it drinkable, whereas others use it to sterilize bottles and jars.

The Instant Pot can even help you neutralize toxins that naturally occur in the environment. For instance, red kidney beans contain a lecithin which can cause food poisoning when people eat under-cooked kidney beans. In fact, you can get food poisoning from eating as few as five kidney beans which were not fully cooked. Thankfully, it has been proven that cooking kidney beans under pressure for ten minutes can greatly reduce the