Going Green in the Kitchen |
Earth Day |
|
According to one study, the average family in the United States spends about $1,300 a year on home utility bills. This is roughly 75% more energy than a family living in the countries of Europe. The average household uses 775 kWh of energy annually for cooking, and for a typical household that can cost as much as $150 each year, or about 6.5 percent of the average home's consumption of electricity, which generates up to 1.5 tons of greenhouse gases. A pressure cooker is a tried and true energy saver by reducing the costs of cooking fuel because food takes much less time to cook. Then there's the savings you get from not having to run the A/C as much during the summer because the pressure cooker isn't going to heat up your kitchen like conventional cooking methods do. Air conditioners often use one unit of energy for each three units of heat they remove from your house, so that's a big cost saver for you, plus that energy reduction also means less smoggy air and reduced greenhouse gas emissions from the power plants used to generate all that electricity. Minimizing the demand for energy through conservation and efficiency is the most cost effective means of reducing your operational and environmental costs, and that's a win-win-win deal! One of main advantages of cooking with a pressure cooker is that it allows you to tackle recipes like dried beans, or the toughest cuts of meat, which are inexpensive, but often avoided because of their lengthy cooking times. The shorter cooking times also help retain the vitamins and nutrients in the food, meaning that you get the most bang for the buck out of the food costs with lower grocery bills. Use the pressure cooker to cook an entire meal on only one burner, and you'll see a substantial fuel savings for you. The versatile pressure cooker is also a multi-purpose pot that takes the place of expensive rice and vegetable steamers, Dutch ovens, braising pans and stock pots. The drastically decreased cooking time insures that you will use much less energy than it would take to cook the same meal by steaming, boiling, braising, or roasting. Consider that a gas stove generates about one kilogram of greenhouse gas for every 10 liters of water boiled, and a pressure cooker requires as little as 1/2 cup water to cook. Less water is loss to evaporation, and there is less water used to clean-up when using the pressure cooker to prepare several foods in combination such as one-pot and multi-course meals. If all this sound like a bargain… what are you waiting for?
|
How Much Can a Pressure Cooker Save You? |
|
|
|
|
Return to the
Library Menu
Tuesday, April 22nd 2008 is celebrated as Earth Day. You don't need to make a radical change to start going green. Even a small change, like shifting more of your day to day cooking to the pressure cooker can show tangible results in saving energy, and that translates into real money savings for you. Using a pressure cooker is a very green option because they are an extremely energy efficient way to cook. Pressure cookers are more economical than most other cooking methods, saving approximately 25% of energy of a convection oven. At 15psi, today's modern pressure cooker will cook food 70% faster than conventional cooking. That's like paying $1 for a gallon of gas instead of $3.