The most helpful piece of cookware for healthy eating
Sometimes I get excited about a particular recipe and go on and on about it, but it’s rare that I get jazzed about cookware. Don’t get me wrong — I have a kitchen full of gadgets, and I actually use most of them on a semi-regular basis. (I was once a professional baker, though — specialty desserts and wedding cakes and the like — and the baking supplies other than basic baking pans are put up in boxes and will be given away at some point whenever I have the time to sort through them. I simply have no need for them anymore.)
But pots and pans? Usually my response is … bleh. You need decent pots and pans to cook in, but beyond that, I’ve never seen the need for anything fancy. Simple stainless steel is good enough for me.
However, there is one non-standard piece of cookware that I own and love: my pressure cooker.
Pressure cookers (PCs) are these amazing pots that cook up a pot of dried beans in less than half an hour, start to finish. You can make veggie soup in even less time under pressure.
And folks, there is nothing better than home-cooked beans.
In fact, I was always a huge fan of garbanzo beans. (Seriously, when I was younger, one of my aunts always gave me a can of them at gift-giving occasions as a silly gift that just happened to be useful. :) But then my family is weird like that.)
But home-cooked garbanzos are leaps and bounds above the canned ones. And yet prior to owning a pressure cooker, I never took the time to make garbanzos from scratch because they take literally several hours to get done, and you have to stir them all the time, and then cook them and cook them some more. And sometimes it seemed like they never got done even still.
Even pre-kiddo I never had the patience for making beans from scratch, opting instead for canned no-salt beans or, on the odd occasion when I’d remember, the crockpot, which I actually gave away within a few months of getting my pressure cooker because I realized I’d never use it again.
I love my pressure cooker because it allows me to make, say, a Mexican meal with delicious homemade pintos or black beans in under 45 minutes (start to finish!) without any pre-planning. I don’t ever even bother to pre-soak the beans! (I love good food, but I’m pretty spontaneous about what I want to make, and the PC lets me have great food in such a short time that I don’t have to worry about planning unless I particularly want to.)
What you might think you know about PCs that is no longer true
PCs get a bad rap sometimes because the old-fashioned ones often had scary problems like, well, exploding because the pressure would get too high and the lid would blow off. Please note that they don’t make them that way anymore!
Well, let me say that all the ones I have investigated are made nothing like the old ones, and there is basically no way to have any safety issues with the new ones whatsoever. The PC I own, in fact, has solid stainless steel holding the lid in place, and there are other safety measures that make sure there’s not even the slightest risk of a mishap.
The pressure cooker I use
There are a couple brands of PCs in particular that come extremely highly recommended: Kuhn-Rikon and Fagor. Both are considered really high-quality, and Kuhn-Rikon is the best of the best.
I personally bought the Fagor because a) the price was right, and b) there was a great combo set that allowed me to get exactly what I needed and gave me flexibility in terms of pot size. The model I have is this one:
Fagor 5-pc. Duo Pressure Cooker Set
(here’s Amazon’s link to the same pressure cooker
In case you don’t have a lot of space in your kitchen, that’s fine. The 8-quart pot is a great option for large batches of beans, soups and stews, whether you need it for pressure cooking or just for use as a regular pot. Likewise, the 4-quart pressure cooker pot is awesome because you can make a single pound of dried beans in it really easily, but I also often use it to make stirfry. I actually got rid of other similar-sized pots when I bought my PC, in fact, because I didn’t have space for more, and the Fagor pots are very high quality. And I use the steamer basket to steam up veggies in a flash without needing yet another pot.
In any case, regardless of which model you choose, having a pressure cooker can make a huge difference in the taste of your food, and it also lets you avoid added salt (common in nearly every regular grocery store brand of canned beans). Plus, the Eden Organics brand of no-salt-added canned beans is well over $2 a can in my area, and I can PC a pound of beans — equal roughly to 2 cans of beans — for under $2 if I don’t go for organic beans, or around $3 if I do. Highly recommended for healthy eating!
I have a Kuhn-Rikon — an off-registry wedding gift that turned out to be our most well-loved and well-used present . . . well, maybe second only to the real essentials like dishes and silverware! I only recently realized how pricey this gift must have been, and feel grateful to the lovely guest who splurged on it for us.
I mentioned Lorna Sass in my last comment, but her name bears repeating because she is the queen of pressure cooking and has some very good, vegan, veggie- and bean-focused recipes. Check out her book Great Vegetarian Cooking Under Pressure if you’re looking to expand your pressure-cooking horizons. :)
I have that Lorna Sass book and refer to it whenever I need the cooking time for a particular bean I’ve not made in a while. I need to revisit it for recipes sometime soon. Thanks for the reminder!
Thanks for this post! I have an old pressure cooker that I don’t trust, so I hardly use it. I wasn’t aware of these newer models. I think I might get one! And I also have this cookbook by Lorna Sass and it’s gone ignored until now because I was afraid to use my pressure cooker. You may have changed my life, haha.
-barb
I was really apprehensive about PCs too because I’d heard all my life that my grandmother had one blow up in her face, but I know these new models are made VERY differently! And now my PC is probably what I use the most in my kitchen other than my Vita-Mix!
BTW what a cool and thoughtful present! :)
Excuse my ignorance but is a pressure cooker different from a Crock Pot which I assume is a slow cooker (which I thought was healthy due to its usage of lower temperatures to cook.)
Thanks so much.
A pressure cooker is kind of the opposite of a slow cooker (Crockpot) — a PC cooks things *very* quickly, as in a pot of beans in under 40 minutes, whereas a slow cooker cooks things over a period of 6-8 hours or more. So a pressure cooker is designed for efficiency and for those of us who don’t necessarily like planning at the beginning of the day what we’re going to eat for dinner … not that planning is a bad thing by any stretch, and I do it myself for 3-4 days at a stretch as my usual meal-planning routine. But I also don’t always wake up wanting to deal with setting up a slow cooker for my dinner, whereas I’m always happy to put on a pot of beans at 6 or 7 p.m. for dinner less than an hour later. I actually got rid of my own slow cooker after realizing that I hadn’t used it in well over a year because I rely so heavily on my PC. (I also run my coaching business from my home, and I found that I didn’t personally want to eat any meal I’d smelled cooking the entire day prior, but that’s probably just me.) :)
If I personally had to decide between a PC or slow cooker, I’d go with the PC, hands-down because anything that speeds up meal prep is a good thing. But I also don’t mind making soups and having to stir them from time to time on my stove when the need arises, whereas with a slow cooker, you can completely not interact with the food all day and it’s done when you’re ready for dinner without your having touched it since stirring up the ingredients initially. I recommend PCs and slow cookers highly for nutrient-dense eating, but each one has different merits.
Also, while at first there’s a bit of a learning curve when using a pressure cooker, there’s no problem with cooking beans and vegetable-based soups and stews at high pressure in the PC because you only bring the food to pressure for a few minutes and they’re done. They’re not cooking for hours at high temp/pressure — more like minutes, and the softer the veggie, the shorter the cook time. A lot of the nutrient loss that we worry about when cooking at high temps is from nutrients leeching into the cooking water anyhow, and since soups and stews still contain the liquid, there’s little loss of nutrition from the heat, and in fact heating also makes some nutrients more bioavailable to us than we would get from consuming the food raw.