Customer Reviews

The Pressure Cooker Gourmet: 225 Recipes for Great-Tasting, Long-Simmered Flavors in Just Minutes (Non)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The pressure cooker is making a comeback after years of disfavor. The old jiggle top units that could be opened and could cause severe burns are pretty much a thing of the past. Coincidentally, as people have less time to spend in the kitchen, the pressure cooker has come back to center stage. For people still a little leery of using one, this book will allay your fears. Victoria Wise discusses thoroughly the hows, the do's and dont's and generally instructs the reader in the proper and successful use of this versatile appliance.

The Pressure Cooker Gourmet includes recipes for soups, meat, poultry, fish, grains, vegetables, legumes, sauces and of course desserts. Although there are photographs of the finished recipes, the reader will delight in the many tips, subtitutions and suggestions that accompany many of the recipes. You will also appreciate the index of recipes with page numbers, that appear at the beginning of each chapter.

Being a poultry fan, I loved the Coq au Vin. The wine sauce was thicker than I ever remember from another method and the blend of herbs and spices was intensified by the increased pressure.

And if you can't resist a moist and rich cheesecake, try the Cheesecake with Mascarpone Cheese in Chocolate Cookie Crust. I had never tried Mascarpone (a very creamy cream cheese) and it, combined with the moist heat of a pressure cooker, was sinfully delicious.

I'm still experimenting with the recipes and there are a lot of them! It takes some 'old time' recipes and applies 21st century flavors and technology to help rekindle our culinary past. As you might imagine, I love this book and you will too! Buy it!!

I wonder if Ms. Wise realy cooked and tried out all these recipes?
The garbonzo bean preparation recipe at the times and temperatures
specified, left the beans to hard and inedible. The Bolognese sauce ,cooked at medium heat, left my new Fagor pressure cooker with a horrible scorch that took me two hours to scour out.(Many of the temperature setting look way too high for pressure cooking) She states that only baby Artichokes can be cooked in a pressure cooker...not true.etc. etc For a better, more reliable, pressure cooker cook book try "Pressure Cookers for Dummys"

I went to the bookstore and skimmed *all* of the pressure cookbooks they had (about 10 different authors). I found this one to be just the right mix between simple, everyday food and gourmet, international specialties. Also, you get many recipes in one book - more than most of the other books had. I made the split pea soup the other night - easy, quick, tasty, and HEALTHY.

I have been cooking "from scratch" for more than 30 years and own more than 50 cookbooks, including most of the great classics. Favorite cookbook authors I return to again and agin include Julia Child, Craig Claiborn, Christopher Kimball, Diana Kennedy, Ruth Reichl, Irene Kuo, Paul Prudhomme and Irma Rombauer (& her descendents). I love ethnic food, gourmet food and great American regional home cooking. The best cookbooks provide detailed techniques and enough information so a confident cook can develop variations based on personal taste and available ingredients. I was dissappointed to find that this book fails in that regard. I purchased it hoping it would be like Barbara Kafka's Microwave Gourmet (still the best on its subject), laying out what this kitchen utensil is best suited for and honestly explaining what it can and cannot do well. Instead, the author seems to believe the pressure cooker should be able to tackle any task. For example, she includes several recipes for items like seafood that are best cooked quickly, but leaves out foods that benefit from long, slow cooking, like soups, sauces and stews. There are only two barebones recipes for stock, one for beef stew (Bouef Bourgiugnon), and a few for odd soups and sauces (like a "blonde onion soup" but no French Onion Soup, a lentil soup but no other legume soups, a Bolognese sauce that dumps raw beef and tomatoes in all at once in violation of all principals I have learned), and several recipes for things like custard and cheesecake. There are unusual, tasty recipes in here, and excellent directions on timing, but I agree with another reviewer who warns that her temperature recommendations are way too high.

This is the best pressure cooker cookbook I've purchase yet! I'd never used a pressure cooker before, and I needed a cookbook to learn how to use it. At first, I was a little intimidated by the title "gourmet", however, the recipes are so simple to follow and the flavors of the dishes are just incredible. I bought another pressure cooker cookbook, but it's just sitting on the shelf collecting dust. The Pressure Cooker Gourmet is fantastic!

I've made 30+ recipes from the book, and all have been great! The author includes a little paragraph of information before each recipe about things to keep in mind while preparing or cooking the dish. The tips are very useful, and I use many while preparing dishes from other cookbooks.

The author calls for the use of fresh herbs (and includes conversions to dry herb amounts, if you don't have fresh). I think this is one of the things that makes these dishes amazingly flavorful & gives your taste buds a wonderful treat!

With about 10% of the recipes, I had a harder time finding some ingredients at my local grocery store around the corner from my house (hence the title "gourmet"). If the ingredient I can't find doesn't seem like it will impact the recipe much, I'll just substitute something else I can find at my local store (i.e. another type of dried bean, a common spice, or another type of dried pepper, for example). Now that I've found a store in town that carried the harder-to-find items, I know exactly where to go to get those things. All these recipes were all well-worth hunting down the ingredients! I'm usually able to find all the ingredients for 90% of the recipes at my local grocery store.

Some of these recipes are very, very quick (5-10 minutes), and some take a bit of time to prepare (over 2-3 hours). I usually make the more time consuming ones on the weekends & have the quick ones when I come home from work at night (the halibut with black olive butter sauce is devine -- 10 minutes). I've found that some of the "time consuming" ones can be greatly shortened by marinating the meats overnight in the frig & then preparing the dish when I get home from work. They are all well worth the time invested, and I look forward to the weekends when I can cook these fabulous dishes!

If you like to have wine with dinner, then this book is for you! Many of the meat & poultry recipes (as well as some of the fish / seafood recipes) call for some amount of wine in the recipe. This leaves a good portion of the bottle left over to enjoy with dinner!

I'm so very happy I found this book! I use it at least 3-4 times per week. If you want to add some zest to your pressure cooking routine, this is a fantastic, flavorful book!

The Pressure Cooker Gourmet showcases 225 superbly presented recipes and instructions by Victoria Wise for today's safe and easy-to-use pressure cookers that will please any palate and satisfy any appetite. From Cream of Tomato Soup; Black Pepper Pot Steak with Shallots and Spicy Red Wine Gravy; American All-Beef Meat Loaf; and Duck with Green Olives, Turnips, and Turnip Greens; to Baby Artichokes and Two Sauces; Zucchini Stuffed with Spinach, Cream Cheese, and Pine Nuts; Omi's Chickpeas with Lime and Onion Ring Topping; and Chevre Rosemary Popover Pudding, The Pressure Cooker Gourmet will prove a real time saver when serving up dishes that would grace any family meal or special celebratory dining event!

The recipes in this cookbook are amazing, producing very well-balanced and complicated-tasting dishes. The Risotto with Porcini Mushrooms and Escarole is one of our favorites. To get these great results, the recipes in this book can be somewhat lenthy, complicated, and/or require unusal ingredients. When we don't have the time (or we're fresh out of escarole), we balance this book with the much simpler (both in terms of taste and preparation) recipes from The Pressure Cooker Cookbook by Toula Patsalis. The Pressure Cooker Gourmet contains a great collection of recipes we never would have been able to prepare before -- although they sometimes can be difficult, the dishes that result are well worth the effort!

Book just arrived and I have only made one dish so far and it was phenomenal..I can't wait to try more of these recipes! I rated this only 4 stars because some of the liquid measurements, cooking time, etc. seemed way way off. I made the Bolognese sauce and it was the BEST I have ever tasted! fyi, I have never made a Bolognese sauce before but have tasted it many times in restaurants. Nor did I think it would be something I would make; I just happened to have all the ingredients in my pantry and went with it.

When I saw the amount of liquid the 2 cans of diced tomatoes provided I just knew an hour's cooking time would turn this to tar. So I added a 15 oz can of tomato sauce which made the sauce so much richer anyway, and after 35 mins my husband said "NOW, I have to eat NOW" (it smelled SO good), so I stopped. Good thing too, as even with the extra liquid of the tomato sauce it was almost burnt; a minute more and it would have been inedible. I had my pressure cooker on low too, but do not own the burner plate the author recommends using. But even with one I would still add the tomato sauce and cook only 30-45 mins.

The only reason I can see to cook it a full hour would be to melt the carrots, celery and onion into the sauce. In the future I will mince the veggies VERY FINELY (or use my mini-chopper to pulverize them before sauteeing) so that I can cook this dish faster. I also added cream instead of milk at the end, but just eyeballed it, maybe 1/4 cup. We both ate huge bowls of pasta and sauce and kept oohing and aahing.

I got this book because I was tired of cooking the same 3-4 dishes in my pressure cooker and needed more variety and wanted a more up to date recipe book...I would buy this book just for the Bolognese sauce recipe alone! But be aware that you should follow your gut (excuse the pun) and add more liquid if necessary or keep checking to see that it's not burning.

Although I haven't had the chance to try more than a handful of recipes, the ones I have tried have been terrific. Instructions are clear and easy to read.

Anyone with any sense knows better to jump directly into a gourmet cookbook if you don't already know the basics for that type of cooking. Doesn't matter if you've already mastered cooking in some other style, you still have to start with the basics. And you can't expect the principles and "rules" for one style of cooking to be the same for another. So with pressure cooking. This is not a book for the virginal beginner who hasn't got a fairly good grasp of basic pressure cooking. This is the book you go to once you feel comfortable with basic, simple pressure cooking and want to learn more complex, involved pressure cooking. It's named "gourmet" for a reason. It's not for type of food most of us eat every day but it's for special, when you want to prepare something impressive. When you're ready to move from basic everyday food to gourmet cooking, this is the book that'll take you there.