Cooking With Pressure: Steam Is The Key

Now you’re cooking with pressure! Sometimes, we just plain and simply don’t have the time to go all out in the kitchen. Regardless of the responsibility in question, be it work or familial commitment, spending three hours preparing a dish is just not on the cards. You may think this means you’re resigned to eating Microwave meals or ready prepared foodstuffs quickly shoved into the oven. In the modern age, there exist a plethora of decides and appliances that can very closely replicate styles or means of cooking that are a tad more complex. One such of these appliances is the Pressure Cooker.

How does cooking with pressure work?

Primarily designed to cook food faster then most conventional cooking methods (and save energy in the process), Pressure Cookers are devices which cook food within a liquid that is enclosed in a sealed space. The combination of boiling water and steam building increases both the heat and the pressure within the sealed space, cooking things far faster then they might if roasted in an oven, for instance. When the cooking process is complete, the Pressure Cooker will gradually and safely release the steam from the sealed area, reducing the risk of damage to the cooker itself and it’s surroundings or injury to the user.

Though it may seem like a newer process to some, the practise of cooking with pressure actually dates back further then most people realise. Though the cooker as we know it today rose to prominence during the 20th century, the practise and indeed the appliance itself dates back to 1679. Denis Papin, a french physicist who studied steam heavily, invented the Steam Digester, a device designed to utilise the pressure of steam to raise the boiling point of water for the express purpose of making cooking easier. Papin presented the device to the Royal Society of London, and though he was accepted as a member, the Steam Digester was treated entirely as a scientific device by the society rather then a tool to make daily life easier. It wouldn’t be until 1864 that they would first be mass manufactured as a device for the masses by a Stuttgart based engineer named Georg Gutbrod.