The Pressure Cooker Cookbook: Over 150 Simple, Essential, Time-Saving Recipes

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Legumes are anti-nutritional. Legumes do contain tannins, lectins, phytic acid and oligosaccharides, technically ‘anti-nutrients’ that affect the bioavailability and digestibility of some nutrients and minerals, but their other nutritional qualities will far outweigh any loss. height (can't be too high for your pressure cooker and it definitely cannot sit against the valves for your safety! You should throw away bean soaking water and cooking water. Some of the oligosaccharides in the beans will leach into the soaking and cooking water, so throwing it away may make the beans a bit less likely to cause wind – but you’ll lose flavour too. For most people it’s fine to cook the beans in the soaking water and use the cooking water in the finished dish. Don’t add soaking water to dishes without boiling though, especially if it is from red beans, because of the toxins. If you leave it on keep warm for a few hours, that temperature will of course drop down. Substitutions If you are of a certain age, you probably have some scary memories of pressure cookers. They had monstrous reputations – ferocious, steam belching geysers, they hissed and rattled away ominously on the stove, threatening to explode if not carefully attended and able to administer nasty scalds if not treated with properly insulated kid gloves. So it's hardly surprising that they are viewed by many as something to be handled with extreme caution at best, dangerous and to be avoided at worst.

Melt together sugar, butter and alcohol. You can add a bit of cream if you want a rich creamy one but Catherine loves the sugar and butter. After the natural pressure release, remove the pudding basin carefully (a long handled trivet or a foil sling will be handy for this part). diameter (needs to be 2 centimetres smaller in diameter than your inner pot or the inside of your pressure cooker for the steam to circulate safely) If you’re well past that (me too), the good news is that starting later still reaps rewards: switching to an optimal diet at 60 could add eight years, and even making the change at 80 could mean an extra three years on your life expectancy.Dried beans last for ever. According to Josiah Meldrum, although Hodmedod’s aims to sell pulses in the year of harvest, they won’t go off. However ‘the starch transforms, getting more and more resistant starch in the beans as they age… so they take longer and longer to cook’. Catherine Phipps agrees, adding that when using a pressure cooker, ‘the older the beans, the harder it is to get them to cook through properly without them collapsing’. I cook my 700 g gammon joints for 18 minutes. I know this is longer than the times stated above but it works for me every time as I tend to buy the same size joint. You can do more than one joint at the same time, I tend to do three 700 g joints in 18 minutes (mainly because Ocado tends to have 700 g gammon joints on offer). Increase the time for bigger joints. Why don’t we eat more pulses? Brits eat fewer than the global average, even if we do put away two million tins of baked beans a day. Confusion over the names doesn’t help: they are often called legumes although these are the plants, members of the family Fabaceae (aka Leguminosae). Their seeds, the actual pulses, grow in pods and include beans, peas, lentils and peanuts (confusingly not nuts at all). For culinary purposes, we divide them by shape: lentils are flattened or ‘lens’-shaped, peas are more or less spherical, beans more oval. Phipps's exceptional book shows that the pressure cooker has moved far beyond its spluttering, drab 1970s incarnation' - The Sunday Times

Also step in my partner Vincenzo, who, before meeting me, had been devoted to his pressure cooker. I asked why he hadn’t bought one for us, or encouraged me to use one, to overcome my fear. He replied that he had, on various occasions, and that I was stubborn. That night, I soaked 500g borlotti beans. The next morning, we drove to his parents to borrow their pressure cooker (which I must note is an Italian model, and slightly different from those Phipps writes about, so with different timings, but the inspiration was all her). The high alcohol content means that, as long as the pudding is stored properly, it can keep for a long time. The blurb before the actual recipe is essential reading and it's laid out that way precisely so that you get all the information you need before you dive in.Heat a ladle full of vodka over a flame or in a small saucepan. Pour it over the pudding. Turn down the lights. Sit and watch it burn. There are lidded pudding basins that are metallic and plastic pudding basins, I don't really trust the latter as the lids have been known to warp under pressure.

Simply tip the pulses into a pan and cover with water by about 5cm (add salt or bicarb if you like), then leave overnight. If you don’t have time for that, just bring the pan straight to the boil. Boil for one minute, then cover and leave to soak for an hour, before continuing with the recipe. If using the foil, place the pudding in the centre of it and lift it into the pressure cooker, placing either on a trivet or onto a folded up piece of cloth - it is not necessary for the basin to be suspended above the water As any pressure-cooker enthusiast — or perhaps, post-Instant Pot, I should say pressure-cooker evangelist — will tell you, there is almost nothing you can’t cook in one, and very often, not merely faster than by using traditional methods, but with better results, too. Catherine Phipps is an altogether calmer exponent: “This book”, she states in her introduction, “is aimed at people who want to cook. I feel it is important to say this right from the start; a pressure cooker isn’t a replacement for the hands-on mechanics of cooking; it just speeds up part of the process.” With a pressure cooker, there’s hardly any evaporation, hardly any steam being released into the kitchen and, with electric pressure cookers, no babysitting involved so you can just leave it to do its thing from beginning to end. When to pressure cook itThe publishing industry until very recently has seemed to agree – there is a real dearth of decent books on the subject, though there are a huge number on slow cookers – why? When I started using a pressure cooker, I found myself reliant on the accompanying recipe booklet, an old Marguerite Patten from the 1970s which is unsurprisingly very out of date, and an American title by Laura Sass, Pressure Perfect, which is great if you can be faffed with all the cup measurements and is unsurprisingly good on beans. More recent is Australian Suzanne Gibbs' recent book which has some very fresh tasting dishes, such as this version of a tagine here. However, I am more excited by the fact that Grub Street have recognised that pressure cookers are woefully under represented, and have therefore commissioned Marguerite Patten to update her 1970s book to reflect modern eating habits – the book will focus more on pulses, grains, stews and soups and will be released as one of the Basic Basics Handbooks sometime in April. The beauty of the Instant Pot is that you can leave it unattended, no need to babysit it and, do not fret, there is no rattling and no hissing. It's silent. It's sturdy. It's very safe. If you haven't got Catherine Phipps' book, The Pressure Cooker Book, it really is worth buying. All recipes have familiar ingredients and measurements for UK Instant Pot users. Suet: Catherine doesn’t advise vegetarian suet as it has palm oil. You get a much softer crumb if you use butter. She thinks it could be done with coconut oil, one to test! Which pressure cooker you go for, however, depends on how you cook, how many you’re feeding and what room you have available. “If you’ve got very little counter space, get one you can leave on the hob,” Phipps advises. “You can then use it as a saucepan, too.” Electric pressure cookers, meanwhile, might suit those who “have lots of worktop space, are used to slow- or multi-cookers and like that way of cooking”; they also come with a multitude of accessories, such as air-fryer lids and yoghurt makers, if they’re up your alley. That said, “if you want to use it mainly as a pressure cooker, you’d do much better to buy a stovetop model”. In terms of size, bigger is often better, Phipps says, because it gives you more options; she has cooked as much as 500g dried beans in her four-and-a-half-litre pressure cooker and as little as 50g rice.