I just saw a recipe calling to use a pressure cooker. Can anyone explain what it does?

Question

It was a recipe for a black bean and corn salad. It told you to put the dried beans in a pressure cooker for so many minutes.

Answer 1

A pressure cooker uses a tightly sealed lid and a weight controlled valve to increase the temperature of cooking by raising the pressure inside the pot. They come in various sizes and are used for cooking and canning. Before microwaves, they were a primary way of speeding up cooking and are especially good when things would require long slow cooking - like beans and tough roasts or birds - to be tender. They are also really helpful at high altitudes.
They are slightly dangerous as they increase the pressure and thus can explode and the steam coming off is higher than 212F. With beans, all kinds of warnings are given to keep the beans from getting in the vent.
We have two and use the smaller one fairly often.

Answer 2

A pressure cooker essentailly cooks food under high pressure, to reduce the cooking time of a food. For a black bean and corn salad, an easy alternative would be to purchase canned black beans - they have already been cooked. If you buy dried beans, you can either cook them in the pressure cooker, or soak them for 48 hours, then boil them. Much easier to buy the cans.

Answer 3

Pressure cookers contain the steam and raise the temperature inside the vessel. You can make stock in 1/2 an hour compared to 6 hours or so in a regular vessel.

It will cook the beans in much less time,,, 15 mins to 1/2 hour compared to 3 or 4 hours

Answer 4

It is a pot with a sealed lid and a pressure regulator. It maintains a pressure (usually 15PSI) inside the pot. It cooks anything that is put in it much more quickly than a regular pot.

Since you don't have a pressure cooker you can just cook the dried beans as you normally would. It will just take a lot longer than your recipe calls for.

Bert

Answer 5

Have you read that it takes long to cook food at high altitudes in places? This is because at high altitudes, the air pressure is much lower than in the plains. As a result, the boiling point of water is lowered. Hence it takes much longer to cook food. In a pressure cooker, on the other hand, high pressures are built up within the vessels. This raises the boiling point of water. Food is cooked within minutes.

Answer 6

a pressure cooker reduces the cooking time, the dried beans would need to be soaked first

Answer 7

Pressure cookers cook via superheated steam. You could cook your beans the traditional way and it would be fine.

Answer 8

you have many good answer, but be very careful using one. and make sure you read how befor u use it.