Modern Pressure Cooking: The Comprehensive Guide to Stovetop and Electric Cookers, with Over 200 Recipes

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Why don’t we eat more pulses? Brits eat fewer than the global average, even if we do put away two million tins of baked beans a day. Confusion over the names doesn’t help: they are often called legumes although these are the plants, members of the family Fabaceae (aka Leguminosae). Their seeds, the actual pulses, grow in pods and include beans, peas, lentils and peanuts (confusingly not nuts at all). For culinary purposes, we divide them by shape: lentils are flattened or ‘lens’-shaped, peas are more or less spherical, beans more oval. It gets better: pulses are also a rich source of resistant starch, fermentable fibre that is great for a healthy gut, and which may reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes. That resistant starch may be good for our brains too, with recent research suggesting that by boosting our intestinal microbiota, it can improve cognition through the brain-gut axis, and even our moods. You should eat beans with grains. Legumes, with the exception of soya beans, don’t contain all the amino acids to make a complete protein, but the shortfall can be made up with grains such as rice or corn. And you don’t need to eat them at the same meal: your body can combine the grain from breakfast with the bean salad at lunch.

Also step in my partner Vincenzo, who, before meeting me, had been devoted to his pressure cooker. I asked why he hadn’t bought one for us, or encouraged me to use one, to overcome my fear. He replied that he had, on various occasions, and that I was stubborn. That night, I soaked 500g borlotti beans. The next morning, we drove to his parents to borrow their pressure cooker (which I must note is an Italian model, and slightly different from those Phipps writes about, so with different timings, but the inspiration was all her).Okay, get both medium and mini pudding basins! How to make a foil sling to lower and lift the pudding basin It is more effective than soaking large amounts of fruit in the tiny amounts of liquid most recipes call for. Simply tip the pulses into a pan and cover with water by about 5cm (add salt or bicarb if you like), then leave overnight. If you don’t have time for that, just bring the pan straight to the boil. Boil for one minute, then cover and leave to soak for an hour, before continuing with the recipe.

You should throw away bean soaking water and cooking water. Some of the oligosaccharides in the beans will leach into the soaking and cooking water, so throwing it away may make the beans a bit less likely to cause wind – but you’ll lose flavour too. For most people it’s fine to cook the beans in the soaking water and use the cooking water in the finished dish. Don’t add soaking water to dishes without boiling though, especially if it is from red beans, because of the toxins. This humdrum tool of grandmother's thrifty cooking is resurrected with an amazing amount of glamour' - The Times Undercooked kidney beans are toxic A lectin called phytohaemagglutinin (PHA) is present in lots of beans, including green beans, and in dangerous levels in red beans such as kidney beans, but it is destroyed by proper cooking. The high alcohol content means that, as long as the pudding is stored properly, it can keep for a long time.If you are of a certain age, you probably have some scary memories of pressure cookers. They had monstrous reputations – ferocious, steam belching geysers, they hissed and rattled away ominously on the stove, threatening to explode if not carefully attended and able to administer nasty scalds if not treated with properly insulated kid gloves. So it's hardly surprising that they are viewed by many as something to be handled with extreme caution at best, dangerous and to be avoided at worst. Phipps's exceptional book shows that the pressure cooker has moved far beyond its spluttering, drab 1970s incarnation' - The Sunday Times If you haven't got Catherine Phipps' book, The Pressure Cooker Book, it really is worth buying. All recipes have familiar ingredients and measurements for UK Instant Pot users. The beauty of the Instant Pot is that you can leave it unattended, no need to babysit it and, do not fret, there is no rattling and no hissing. It's silent. It's sturdy. It's very safe.

Author Catherine Phipps gently guides readers through everything they need to know about cooking in a stovetop or electric pressure cooker, with foolproof, step-by-step instructions. You can leave your pressure cooker Christmas Pudding on Warm in your electric pressure cooker as long as you want really.

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If you want to make sure that it’s cooked right through to the middle: use a thermometer probe like the Thermapen to make sure it’s at least 98ºC. Close, bring up to high pressure and immediately remove from the heat. In an electric pressure cooker this means programming 0 minutes. The pressure cooker is the number one gadget for people who want to slice huge chunks off the cooking time of meat, pulses and sauces. From ribs that fall off the bone, to stew, casserole or braised meat, a pressure cooker can achieve great results in under an hour. Pasta and rice can be made from scratch in less than 10 minutes; thrifty cooks can tenderise flavoursome cheap cuts in just 20 minutes and pulses can be cooked without having to soak them. Speed isn't the only advantage of pressure cookers - they also preserve nutrients and vitamins, as well as being a more economical way to cook. Adding bicarbonate of soda to bean cooking water helps them soften. When it comes to softening beans, (a little) bicarb is good, sugar and acid are bad. A small amount of bicarb definitely speeds up cooking, but don’t add too much or it will make the beans taste soapy. Salt also seems to speed up cooking slightly, and it’s great for flavour. Because sugar and acid are bad news for cooking beans, when making beans in tomato sauce, don’t add tomatoes (which are sweet and sour) until the beans are well and truly soft. The upside is that the tomatoes should stop the beans collapsing further. By cooking food at temperatures that are far higher than conventional ovens, pressure cookers drastically reduce cooking times enabling us to cook in a cheaper, healthier and greener way. Pasta and rice can be made from scratch in less than 10 minutes; thrifty cooks can tenderise flavoursome cheap cuts in just 20 minutes and pulses can be cooked without having to soak them.

The publishing industry until very recently has seemed to agree – there is a real dearth of decent books on the subject, though there are a huge number on slow cookers – why? When I started using a pressure cooker, I found myself reliant on the accompanying recipe booklet, an old Marguerite Patten from the 1970s which is unsurprisingly very out of date, and an American title by Laura Sass, Pressure Perfect, which is great if you can be faffed with all the cup measurements and is unsurprisingly good on beans. More recent is Australian Suzanne Gibbs' recent book which has some very fresh tasting dishes, such as this version of a tagine here. However, I am more excited by the fact that Grub Street have recognised that pressure cookers are woefully under represented, and have therefore commissioned Marguerite Patten to update her 1970s book to reflect modern eating habits – the book will focus more on pulses, grains, stews and soups and will be released as one of the Basic Basics Handbooks sometime in April. If you’re well past that (me too), the good news is that starting later still reaps rewards: switching to an optimal diet at 60 could add eight years, and even making the change at 80 could mean an extra three years on your life expectancy. You will end up with a very sturdy length of foil which you can use to lower your pudding into the pressure cooker. Traditionally, Christmas puddings are boiled on the stovetop for 8 hours, continuously releasing steam into your kitchen and having to keep an eye on the water level.

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There are lidded pudding basins that are metallic and plastic pudding basins, I don't really trust the latter as the lids have been known to warp under pressure. Beans means… a longer life, according to a study at Norway’s University of Bergen. The research, published in the journal PLOS Medicine last month, estimated that changing from the typical Western diet to a better one – including plenty of pulses like beans and lentils – could add more than a decade to your life if you start in your 20s.