Modernist cuisine at home with pressure cookers

If you’re going to attempt modernist cooking at home, the first step is to purchase a pressure cooker. No other tool transforms food the way a pressure cooker does and you’ll find countless of modernist recipes that call for a pressure cooker. So read up on the best pressure cooker reviews at Cook With Pressure who have done a fabulous job of consolidating information in one place.

Many of you may remember that science class experiment where an egg gets sucked into a bottle. Well that’s exactly what will happen when pressure builds up inside the bottle from a heat source and tries to escape. After the egg gets sucked in, leaving an opening on the bottle, the pressure inside returns to normal. Pressure cooking is kind of the same thing, except inside a pressure cooker you trap the pressure using a locked lid until your food is done cooking.

Using a pressure cooker is like doing science projects with your food. When you heat it up, pressure builds up. Then to maintain that pressure to cook your food, you would lower your heat source. Finally to release that pressure, you would cool it down under running water and optionally, using the steam release system on your cooker. Because it is an intense cooking process, you typically cook food inside your pressure cooker for only about 10 to 15 minutes, making it a popular cookware for busy people and people watching their energy bills. Even the toughest of meats and beans will break down.

Cooking food in a pressurized environment opens to the door to many new ways to experience food – the essence of modernist cuisine. For instance, if you fry chicken in a pressure cooker rather than a conventional fryer, the result is a juicier, more flavourful, more tender chicken. That’s because of the enclosed environment locking in moisture and accelerated cooking time. In other words, science! What’s more is that a pressure cooker is able to penetrate the chicken with flavour. Rumour has it that KFC came up with this technique to make their friend chicken because back in the day, chickens lived longer and had tougher meat.

While pressure cookers have been invented many moons ago, these days pressure cookers are available in more options. For convenience, the electric pressure cooker was invented and among them, the Instant Pot IP-DUO60 is a popular model.

Whether you plan to fry chicken, make soup, or cook a risotto, the pressure cooker is an indispensable tool. It’s a simple cookware to use and there’s no reason why you can’t make your own modernist recipes at home!