Читать книгу The Complete Book of Pressure Cooking - L.D. Michaels - Страница 5

I’ve always enjoyed cooking if I’ve understood what was going on. It’s made the actual activity more enjoyable and the results much better. In addition, I now find it a lot easier to invent and adapt my own recipes. You can’t really appreciate how best to use a pressure cooker unless you know a little about cooking techniques in general. If you are at all worried about the healthiness of the food you eat, you should know something about what happens when various ingredients are heated. You can, if you wish, skip most of this chapter and go straight to the recipes and tables, but it would be a pity if you did.

I have tried to avoid too much of the domestic science/catering college/chef school/food science laboratory narrative, but some of the information is of great use to the cook who may think that they work solely on instinct and experience.

The pressure cooker delivers two cooking techniques: pressure steaming and pressure simmering/pressure poaching. Nearly all forms of pressure cooking take place at a temperature of about 121°C (250°F) and at a pressure twice that of the atmosphere we normally breathe (and cook at). It is these unusual conditions that, by a combination of heat and steam penetration, give the rapid results. Heat gets to the heart of a lump of food more easily if moisture (either liquid or steam) helps to conduct it there, and the pressure helps to get it there even more rapidly.