Pressure Cooker Perfection: 100 Foolproof Recipes that will Change the Way You Cook Author: The Editors at America's Test Kitchen | Language: English | ISBN:
B00BJ6SMW2 | Format: EPUB
Pressure Cooker Perfection: 100 Foolproof Recipes that will Change the Way You Cook Description
Cook Under Pressure with Confidence: A pressure cooker is capable of delivering perfectly cooked food with deep, slow-cooked flavor on a fast-food timeframe—but when you lock on that lid, you want a recipe you know you can count on. We ran hundreds of tests in fifteen pressure cookers to find out what works and what doesn’t. We show you the essential techniques that are key to success, and we provide troubleshooting tips with every recipe. Don’t own a pressure cooker? We rate a dozen best-selling models. With this foolproof guide to cooking under pressure, every home cook will be guaranteed success.
- File Size: 10942 KB
- Print Length: 179 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1936493411
- Publisher: America's Test Kitchen (March 15, 2013)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00BJ6SMW2
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #51,896 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #19
in Books > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Kitchen Appliances > Pressure Cookers
- #19
in Books > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Kitchen Appliances > Pressure Cookers
SUMMARY - This book:
- omits whole categories of food that highlight the benefits of pressure cooking;
- gets operating instructions wrong, resulting in many overlong timings & overcooked food [ETA];
- shows lack of breadth in range of cooking technique; and
- incompletely surveys available models in the buying guide.
Pressure cooking is a great technique for maximizing flavor & simplifying cooking, and the visibility of ATK will make this book be many people's first introduction to pressure cooking. However in spite of their hand-holding instructions, I can't recommend it as a first pressure cooker book (see the HipPressureCooking website "Beginner Basics" instead). The individual recipes are well-presented (except for bad timings, below) though available elsewhere, but in terms of covering pressure cooking techniques and ideas, the book gets some things wrong, and the collection is fairly narrow and incomplete. As a fan of the ATK approach, I was not expecting this range of problems. DETAILS:
FOOD CATEGORIES: I expected a comprehensive treatment of all things pressure cooking, given the title. Instead this is mostly a collection of braised & moist-cooked meat recipes. Out of the 64 recipes (& variations), only 17 are vegetarian (mostly starch), rather than the variety found in any of several more comprehensive pressure cooker recipe books (e.g. by Laura Pazzaglia, Victoria Wise, Lorna Sass, or Jill Nussinow, and others).
The vegetable coverage is especially weak, with most vegetables out there simply missing. The timing chart on p. 20 only lists 15 vegetables, 4 of which are potatoes. (Astonishing that a food editor would not see the problem with this.
I thought America's Test kitchen was churning out fail proof recipes. I thought they were trying out all the different options in appliances and ingredients to tell us which ones were the best. In the past I thought they were doing a bang up job!
Then comes along Pressure Cooker Perfection. A cookbook that sound like it is going to be right up my alley since I grew up with marvellous food coming from pressure cookers and have a firm belief in the ability of Pressure cooking to save energy, save time and produce terrific food.
The first hint that things might not be quite right was a quick flip through the book and all the many pictures of meat : chicken, roasts, stews, Turkey, etc. There is woefully little devoted to anything besides meat and potatoes - although there is a tempting looking recipe for beets and another for artichokes. There are absolutely no recipes for desserts - puddings, flans, etc perhaps because there is not a single recipe that mentions using a steamer basket or a trivet.
The second oddity was the fact that the book ranked the Fagor cooker (I own one) as a top buy and a Kuhn rikon as a 'recommended with reservations'! Without going into a review of pressure cookers, I would recommend that you read the reviews for both brands on Amazon before taking the plunge and buying a cheaper but more frustrating appliance. I've learned how to handle my Fagor but, compared to the pressure cookers that I grew up with, it is a second class appliance.
However, I took my hissing, spitting Fagor and a whole organic chicken and set out to try the recipe for the whole chicken in rosemary and garlic. the cook time seemed a bit long but I figured I would trust the books - tested by America's test Kitchen after all.
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