Using Pressure Cookers to Whip Up Healthy Meals
Pressure cooking is only a few hundred years old and the pressure cookers of yesterday look like time machines compared to the streamlined new versions of today. The main attraction to pressure cookers is the time involved in cooking foods – especially meats.
For example, a pot roast can be pressure cooked to perfection in an hour rather than cooking them for four hours in your oven. That’s why pressure cookers are enjoying a newfound popularity – people just don’t have the time anymore to cook the old-fashioned way.
Plus, pressure cooking tenderizes food like no other method you can use to cook meat. The pressure cooker traps moisture inside the meat and cooks them so they’re as tender as possible.
But there are many other reasons to love pressure cooking. It’s a healthy way to cook foods since high temperature cooking is the same as low-temperature cooking when it comes to destroying nutrients.
You’ll use much less water with a pressure cooker, and it works like a steam cooker so there’s much less water to steal away the nutrients than with ordinary boiling or grilling methods.
In a recent study involving healthy cooking with pressure cookers, it was determined that pressure cooking was the best technique you can use to preserve the beta-carotene and ascorbic acid in spinach and other vegetables.
You’ll keep the nutrients intact with other food cooking too and even help with digestion issues. Pressure cooking grains, legumes and seeds reduces the lectins and phytic acid, making them much more digestible than using the long cooking method at low temperatures.
In fact, pressure cooking is equal to the fermentation method when it comes to lessening lectins in grains and some other food items. Keep in mind that you can prepare entire meals in one pot such as soups and stews.
It takes very little time – and some cookers can be programmed to monitor the cooking time and pressure. One pot cooking also reduces the mess in the kitchen – and you can even use frozen food items if you forget to defrost them during the day.
Pressure cookers have advanced in quality and looks from the olden days. The older models didn’t have all the built-in safety measures that those of today have and stories of sauces and soups on the ceiling abound.
Today, pressure cookers are as safe and easy as any cooking method. Choose from a wide array of types, sizes and prices online and most of all have fun when you use it. In no time you’ll be cooking healthy and tasty meals for you and your family.
