Vegetables provide our bodies with a lot of essential vitamins that they cannot produce on their own. Vitamins allow our body to grow and function properly. They also keep us safe from a lot of harmful diseases that may end up killing us in the long run.
Fresh or frozen vegetables are easy to handle and just as easy to cook. Nowadays, the time needed to cook a vegetable, fresh or frozen, has gotten even shorter.
Why Does It Take Less Time To Cook Vegetables In A Pressure Cooker?
The pressure cooker has made home cooking faster, everything ranging from meat to vegetables have had their cooking time shortened.
But how does it happen?
Well, for vegetables there are two main reasons, chemical composition, and pressure cooking mechanism.
Chemical composition
Within our food groups, vegetables are the ones that contain the least amount of dry matter. If you look at a vegetable’s chemical composition, you will notice that it mostly consists of water. Some vegetables like the cucumber only have 5 percent dry matter, the other 95 percent is just water. Similarly, almost all types of vegetables have high water content. For example, carrots have 85 percent water, sweet potato 80 percent, etc. Only a few vegetables have water-content less than 60 percent.
Due to having high water content, vegetables tend to cook faster than any other food type. Because relative to something like meat with connective tissues and fibers, water tends to heat up and evaporate at a much higher rate. Thus foods with high water content will always cook much faster.
Pressure cooking mechanism
The way a pressure cooker works is easy to understand. The basic purpose of a pressure cooker is to increase the boiling point of a liquid. We know that pressure will always be directly proportional to temperature. Thus, increasing pressure will always increase the temperature at which your liquid boils.
Having a tightly closed lid stops the moisture from escaping the pot. The moisture then builds up over time which increases the pressure inside a cooker. The increased pressure increases the temperature, and your food cooks a lot faster.
Vegetables have a lot of water, so cooking them inside a pressure cooker brings those water molecules to a boil a lot faster, thus vegetables inside a pressure cooker will cook a lot faster.
Why use a pressure cooker?
Aside from cooking your vegetables a lot faster, there is another reason for cooking inside a pressure cooker.
Vegetables are full of useful vitamins, some of them require cooking to bring out flavor and nutrients. But cooking vegetables in water causes nutrient loss. Water leeches the nutrients out of a vegetable over a long period. Scientists have estimated that vegetables with high water content lose 35 percent of their vitamins when cooked for 10 to 15 minutes. Whereas, the same vegetables only loses 10 percent when cooked inside a pressure cooker.
In conclusion, pressure cookers are not just a little faster, they are also a healthier option. So, if you have a pressure cooker it’s always a good idea to cook your vegetables through it. This will save you more time and provide you with 90 percent of the nutrients.