Customer Reviews

Pressure Cooking for Everyone

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I have purchased several cookbooks for pressure cooking and have found only a few recipes that interested me. Rick Rodgers has rekindled my interest in the pressure cooker. This book gives clear instructions and recipes for many popular recipes. What I have been looking for and until now failed to find, is a cookbook that gives directions for making traditional 'American cuisine'. You will enjoy recipes for pot roast, barbequed chicken, beef stew with carrots and potatoes, beans, spaghetti and meatballs and a host of other favorites. And no pressure cooker book is complete without a sinfully delicious cheesecake recipe. Mr. Rodgers gives us Orange and Chocolate Marbled Cheesecake and you won't be disappointed. If you are looking to trim your cooking time and still be able to serve some of your favorite traditional meals, then this book will be a delightful addition to your kitchen library.

This cookbook has a quality not normally associated with pressure cooking: glamour! These are not Grandma's pressure cooking recipes! New techniques, great pictures and graphics made this book a joy to read and use. I haven't had a chance to try many recipes yet, but I'll be using this one a lot. I went straight to the rice pudding, a favorite comfort food of mine. It was done in 11 minutes and tasted great, with no added fat besides milk. I can't wait to try some of the more fancy desserts, like Black Forest Croissant Pudding and Cafe' Con Leche Flan. I need to get a springform pan and try the cheesecake, as well (I noted in my pressure cooker review that it would be great if the manufacturers made custom inserts for this! I may be dreaming...)

I'm giving this book 4 stars simply because no one cookbook can cover it all. For the basics, and for more "family" type meals, you may want another book. This book really does reflect the way my family eats (with a baby and 4-year-old) but we also eat a lot more basic soups, steamed vegies, and grilled seafood (one thing that doesn't work in the PC.) I usually improvise, and in fact I found a few of these recipes were nearly identical to meals I've cooked recently (beet and orange salad, Mexican chicken tacos).

I'll skip the red meat recipes, but the bean recipes are fresh and wonderful, and there are some great chicken recipes as well (Moroccan chicken, Mexican chicken in soft tacos). I recommend taking a class in pressure cooking, but if you can't, this is the next best thing. I'm not surprised that pressure cooking seems to be experiencing a revival, but I am surprised it took this long. I love my pressure cooker (see review) and would be hard-pressed to cook most meals without it!

Bon appetit!

I am relatively new to pressure cooking (about 1 year) and what led me to THIS book was the fact that I'd just purchased the crockpot/slow cooker cookbook written by Rick Rodgers and was truly thrilled to find a book that held crock pots to a "higher standard" - it's a very very good book if you want excellent results from your slow cooker. . . but this review is about THIS book - again written partly by Rick Rodgers -- and once again, I was not disappointed!

Great recipes - above and beyond the bland and ordinary. My kids have eaten everything I've made from this book (they have been introduced to a lot of unusual foods as well so they're not at ALL picky) -- anyway - their favourites so far are spaghetti w/meatballs (incredibly fast to prepare, particularly if you make the meatballs the night before!), beef bourginon (sp?), and the 3-meat bolognese pasta sauce. I usually up the garlic and some of the spices because we like rather highly seasoned food - but the basics here are very sound - not found one recipe yet that we didn't sit down to where we were floored as to how good the result was. I have to say, I am now using my pressure cooker more than my crockpot or any other form of cooking.

I bought this book and took a pressure cooking class at Arlene's school in Wayne, NJ - Adventures In Cooking. She and Rick Rodgers are really the experts when it comes to pressure cooking. The recipes in this book are wonderful - my favorites are the risottos. I still can't believe that risotto could be so easy - only 8 minutes and no stirring! I'd recommend this book to anyone who hasn't the time to spend in the kitchen, or just likes great food prepared quickly. And if you're in NJ, check out the pressure cooking classes at Adventures In Cooking and see Rick and Arlene together in person.

I bought several pressure cookbooks to go with my new Faberware Electronic Pressure Cooker. The first one to arrive was this one. After cooking a great roast from a recipe in the reviews on the same cooker, I decided to try a seafood recipe. A trip two years ago to Del Mar in California left me with wonderful memories of my first taste Cioppino. The North Beach Cioppino recipe in this book brought back that wonderful memory. The flavor is unbelievably good. Seafood never tasted so naturally sweet. My only addition was to cook up some fresh Linguine pasta to put it over as in the restaurant version. Thanks for the memory and I can't wait to make more wonderful dishes with this unbelievable book. Cookbooks promise so much and usually deliver only different; this ones delivers great.

I looked at almost every book on the market for pressure cookers and this was one of the books I chose. I liked the variety of the recipes, the pictures which alot do not have and the information was helpful if you are new to pressure cooking. I found it to be very thorough and covered a wide range of dishes...meat, poultry,desserts and even just vegetable and bean dishes if you are not into meat.....Highly Recommended!!!!

I'm disappointed in how bland the meat dishes are. As one reviewer said, increase your seasonings. I've also had to decrease the pressure cooking times on some because the meat would come out almost in shreds! There's also one recipe that surprised me - the short ribs that have to be cooked three times - first to brown, then pressure cooked twice, and then crusted and baked. Good grief! Doesn't all that defeat the supposed ease of using a pressure cooker? Overall, it's not a bad book; it's just not as good as I had hoped it would be.

A wonderful and well thoughtout book. All your questions are answered without needing to have a culinary degree. The pictures are splendid and the recipies are easy to follow. A must for anyone who loves good, wholesome food, but does not have the time to labor over the stove. Why make a 4-6 hour beef stock when you can do one in an hour.

After investing in a pressure cooker, I knew that I'd need a cookbook or two to help me get the most out of it. I took two books out of the library to audition them for long-term placement in the cookbook library (which I may yet review; I haven't finished evaluating The Pressure Cooker Gourmet or Miss Vickie's Big Book of Pressure Cooker Recipes). But on a browsing trip to the local bookstore I found this one, too, and the author's name sold it for me; I have a few Rick Rodgers cookbooks and all have been reliable or better (recommended: Kaffeehaus: Exquisite Desserts from the Classic Cafés of Vienna, Budapest, and Prague).

Pressure Cooking for Everyone does a very good job, but in the long term I don't think it will be the only pressure cooking cookbook I own. (This is not necessarily a bad thing! Except for my bookshelf situation, which is becoming dire.)

There are recipes for foods in just about every category: soups & stocks; meat main courses; poultry and seafood; beans; risotto and grains; quick pasta sauces; vegetables; desserts and fruits. There's plenty of American comfort food and "the usual suspects," such as a Yankee pot roast; however one thing I like about this book is a wide breadth of ethnic recipes, such as a Cuban pot roast (with capers and olives) and osso busco, in a relative short (150 page), inexpensive cookbook.

The introductory sections about using your pressure cooker aren't as extensive as I've seen in the other books; Rodgers clearly expects your equipment manual to go into depth. Every recipe has an inspirational photo, which I know matters to some people.

So far, I've made two recipes, with good (4-star, not 5-star) results: chicken alla cacciatorra (Italian chicken stew) and last night's risotto with butternut squash and sausage. Both were straightforwardly written, though as other reviewers have remarked Rodgers is a bit light-handed with seasoning (just 3/4 tsp "Italian seasoning" for a a a whole chicken?). Neither generated leftovers that made us say, "Sheesh, do we still have THIS to use up?"

I have little post-it tabs stuck in several more recipes. Besides the aforementioned osso bucco, I'm looking forward to the quick-cooking boeuf bourguignonne, pinto bean salad with chile vinaigrette, and five-spice pork roast.

Rodgers does fall for the "I have a gadget and I'm going to use it for everything" trap which is slightly irritating. For example, the risotto has you use the steamer basket to cook the butternut squash (for one minute), then quick-release the pressure, clean out the pressure cooker, and get on with the sausage and rice. You add the squash at the end. I just steamed the squash separately, which was more effiencient.

I'm glad I have this cookbook, and I'm sure to use it regularly. But I'm not going to say "This is the only pressure cooker book you should own," and I'm not sure it's the best first-book, either. I like it; if you're comfortable with your equipment and looking for more inspiration, you'll probably like it, too.

I gave this cookbook five stars because this book has added variety to my cooking at a level achieved by no other cookbook. It is the whole package. There is a picture for each recipe (I mean come on, with today's technology publishing cookbooks without pictures for each recipe is unacceptable.) The pictures inspire me to explore the recipes I haven't yet tried. Although I have dozens of cookbooks, I have probably tried a greater percentage of the recipes in this book over every other cookbook I have except Julia Child's. This may sound like a small aspect, but variety is, for me, hard to maintain with my work schedule. It's just so much easier to quickly throw together the same stuff I've been cooking for 40 years. But I am having fun with this cookbook. And every recipe has been a success, and surprisingly good. For example, I was concerned that the Boeuf Bourguignonne from a pressure cooker would be like something from a crockpot - all the flavors melded together past the point of recognition. In the past my Boeuf Bourguignonne was based on a great recipe from Cook's magazine that took about five hours to prepare (definitely not a work-night meal), but resulted in a tender beef with a complex sauce. The pressure-cooked Bourguignonne was at least as good with layers of flavor in the sauce, and the meat was more tender. I'm looking forward to the Osso Bucco (another dish that normally takes hours of preparation.) I am also having fun with the authors' choices of herbs and spices. Although some reviewers have noted insufficient flavorings, I always adjust the amounts to suit our tastes. And I make adjustments in the cooking times. I recently replaced my old pressure cookers with more modern ones, and each type has required adjustments in the time. I will have to figure out new times anyway when we move from an elevation of about 600' above sea level to 5700' above sea level. It's just a matter of intentionally undercooking the first time or two, putting the lid back on to finish cooking, and making notes in the cookbook for how long it actually took to cook that recipe, After a few recipes, you get a feel for how your pressure cookers perform at your elevation and to your preferences. I am now serving on work-nights the kinds of meals that used to be reserved for weekends simply by pre-browning the meats and poultry on the weekend. Then it takes only minutes to put a pressure cooker meal on the table after getting home.