Don't Drown Your Food  Return to the Main Menu for More Information Most pressure cooker recipes cook with steam, NOT by boiling. To serve up delicious, nutritious meals we want to achieve three things: Cook in as little water as possible to preserve nutrients, so steam heat is desirable. Use the lowest heat setting to avoid destroying nutrients. Cook as quickly as possible to preserve vitamins and minerals. It is not necessary to drown meats or vegetables in water or other liquids. While there are exceptions, we generally want to use the active steam under pressure to cook foods because it preserves the most vitamins and nutrients. That's not only good nutrition, but it's also economical. The pressure cooker is the prefect choice, plus it is energy efficient. This allows the frugal cook to buy less expensive meat cuts and still produce wholesome AND nutritious meals at minimal cost. Many new, and even some experience cooks, persist in drowning food under water when cooking a pressure cooker. This not only robs your family of proteins, vitamins and minerals, but it costs additional money for unnecessary fuel costs, but the flavor is left in the water, not the food. The owners manual of many second generation cookers recommend a minimum 1/2 cup liquid for cooking, and generally the weighted-jiggle top cookers need at least 1 cup for every 20 minutes of cooking. Check your owners manual to be sure. Longer cooking times (20 minutes and up) will require more liquid than just the minimum required. Try the Test Drive to see how much water your cooker uses. To Boil Or Not To Boil When you cover foods with water it takes longer to bring the cooker to pressure, which means more of your money is going to pay for cooking fuel, a preventable and unnecessary expense. More importantly, the longer cooking time and the higher heat needed to bring the pot to pressure, destroys vitamins and minerals. Also, most of the flavor and nutrients are being leached out into the water. This is fine for soup stocks and broth but if you pour off the liquid you not only lose money, but cheat your family out of the nutrients needed for good health. In general, boiling under pressure is reserved for the driest, toughest meats, such as those that have been cured, brined, pickled or smoked - corned beef, hams, etc. Boiling is the preferred method of cooking when the resulting broth is more important than the foods cooked in them - soup stock for example. All too often I see people cooking beef roasts, pork ribs or corn of the cob under water. This is so wasteful in terms of money and lost nutrients. The end product is overcooked and has little flavor and doesn't compare with the more traditional steaming, or braising method. A Few Exceptions To Every Rule There area few choices to consider when boiling under pressure; water that is discarded, water that is intended to be used as stock, or water or other flavoring liquid that is intended as a marinade. I mentioned soups above, and a good example would be a whole chicken that is cooked, covered in water. The meat can be used for soup, stew, salad, sandwiches -lots of recipes, but the cooking water will become a nutritious soup base, broth or stock. So even though we expect that the boiled meat will not have all the flavor and nutrients of steamed chicken, the broth will be rich and nutritious. Processed meats, such as smoked ham hocks, neck bones, pigs feet and so forth, are best cooked under water because they are dry and tough from the smoking/curing process and take a long time to cook, even under pressure. The resulting flavorful broth can be skimmed of fat and used at once or saved and frozen in handy 1 cup portions for later use. The broth from smoked meats is rich and hearty and provides much needed flavor in recipes for dried beans and soups. Some foods are appropriate to drown and the cooking water is then discarded. Corned beef should be cooked under water .This meat is usually fatty and can be salty, so submerging a corned beef in water will help leach out some of the fat and salt and discard the water after cooking. This is also true of hams that are too dry or salty. Game meats like venison and fowl will also to well in this cooking method, and even better using the infusion method. Super-Marinading or Infusion Cooking Sometimes is may be desirable to cook foods covered in a well seasoned,flavorful liquid, or a marinade. This is the secret of infusion cooking. A good example would be Lemon Chicken, where browned chicken breasts are cooked or super-marinaded in lemon juice and water or stock. This imparts the lemon flavor to the chicken, and pressure cooking drives that taste deep into the meat, not just on the surface. Infusion cooking is appropriate for thin cuts of meat like chicken parts, chops, steaks and so forth, but it is not effective on thick cuts of meat like a roast.