The Ultimate Pressure Cooker Cookbook: More Than 85 Foolproof Irresistible Recipes Tested in All the Most Popular Models [Hardcover]

Tom Lacalamita (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 14, 1997

Pressure cookers have changed a lot since your grandmother's day. They were once noisy, risky, and ineffective, but today's new machines are safe and sleek, and make cooking fabulous meals in no time a snap. In The Ultimate Pressure Cooker Cookbook, Tom Lacalamita's expert advice will guide you through buying and caring for your pressure cooker, and his delicious foolproof recipes are your keys to success.

By cooking with high temperature and steam pressure, a pressure cooker seals in flavor and prepares in minutes what takes hours with conventional methods. Besides being an incredible time saver, a pressure cooker is capable of producing delicious, intensely flavored food that is also low in fat. Imagine being able to produce healthy nutritious home-cooked meals any night of the week. With The Ultimate Pressure Cooker Cookbook as your companion, it is all possible.

Just pile the ingredients into a pot, lock the lid, and bring to full pressure, and in 20 minutes you can have rich homemade soup that tastes as if it had been simmering on the stove for hours. Perhaps you feel like a taste of Italy...how does perfect creamy risotto in 10 minutes sound? Delicious meals that taste as though you spent the day in the kitchen are at your fingertips when you use a pressure cooker.

With the same thoroughness used in his three previous books in the Ultimate Cookbook series, Lacalamita begins by methodically examining all the types of pressure cookers available, giving careful instructions and expert advice on their use and maintenance. In over 85 triple-tested recipes derived from the Mediterranean tradition, he then shows how pressure cookers are great tools for today's cooks. Step-by-step instructions guide you through these tasty and healthy pressure-cooker recipes -- from rich Vegetable Soup with Basil or hearty Turkish Bean Stew to Mussels h la Cataplana and Loin of Pork with Bitter-Orange Sauce. In addition to nutritional analysis for each recipe, charts of basic cooking times and conversion formulas are provided so that favorite home recipes can also be adapted to cooking in the pressure cooker.

In The Ultimate Pressure Cooker Cookbook, Tom Lacalamita is your guide to the world of fast, fabulous cooking.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Streamlined and made essentially "explosion-proof," the lowly pressure cooker has become almost glamorous. In his fourth appliance cookbook (see, most recently, The Ultimate Espresso Machine Cookbook, LJ 12/95), LaCalamita offers 100 or so easy recipes. The collection could more accurately be called The Pressure Cooker-Mediterranean Diet Cookbook, for Mediterranean foods are what LaCalamita makes in his cooker, from Garlic Soup to Venetian-Style Artichokes. Lorna Sass's Cooking Under Pressure (LJ 11/15/89) remains one of the best books on the subject, but larger collections will want LaCalamita's, too.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Problems often associated with using a pressure cooker--food on the ceiling and other culinary atrocities--are, quite simply, outdated. According to Lacalamita, this handy cooking tool deserves more than just a modicum of respect, considering that it conserves food values and the home chef's time. Tips, advice, and counsel are featured upfront, with notes on proper use, care, and accident avoidance. (As he points out, new designs of the pressure cooker include so many safety devices and are so easy to use that even the clumsiest of cooks should be relieved.) Most of the more than 90 recipes are Mediterranean or, at least, inspired by the cuisines of the region; there is a strong emphasis on dried beans, legumes, grains, and vegetables. But the real draw of this book is the incredible time savings. Barbara Jacobs

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (April 14, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684824965
• ISBN-13: 978-0684824963
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #750,901 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

62 of 69 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars If you like one style cooking this books for you!, March 2, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Ultimate Pressure Cooker Cookbook: More Than 85 Foolproof Irresistible Recipes Tested in All the Most Popular Models (Hardcover)

Having just bought my first pressure cooker, still filled with those childhood mental pixs of my mother's outraged cries, when the spinich hit the ceiling, I was looking for the beginner's guide. This book is not it.

Yes, it praises the wonders of pressure cookery, but says little as to how to prepare your first culinary attempts as you anxiously glance upwards. The author appears to be trying to reach two goals. The first, is to advance pressure cooking in the states, and second,to promote the healthy effects of mediterranean cooking.

In this reader's opinion, he fails on both counts. While there are several chapters on the nature of pressure cookery and the types of pressure cookware, these paragraphs are but glossy overviews interspaced with accounts of the author's life as student in Spain. In short, the book is light on specifics.

As to the recipes, the title says it all. They are in fact, selected items of mediterranean cooking. While they maybe the author's favorites and have a certain culinary curiosity about them, they should not be the cook's first few steps with the new pressure cooker. Recipe requirements are well setforth, but only terse paragraphs are given to preperation. This same paragraph is repeated and repeated in each new recipe. Conclusion, if didn't do it right the first time well....

Certainly, there are plenty of excellent mediterranean cookbooks out there. What we need is a good "how to" pressure cookbook. Then once the steam vessel is mastered, we will adapt those recipe favorites including mediterranean.

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars fast, savory, healthful Mediterranean cooking, September 14, 2004

By 

Cat from Belmont (Belmont, MA USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Ultimate Pressure Cooker Cookbook: More Than 85 Foolproof Irresistible Recipes Tested in All the Most Popular Models (Hardcover)

When I recently purchased a pressure cooker, a friend suggested this book and loaned me her copy. (I had already ordered copies of two of the Lorna Sass pressure cooking books, "Great Vegetarian Cooking Under Pressure" and her new one, "Pressure Perfect.") I saw so many recipes I wanted to try that I am purchasing this book, too. My friend has made many of the recipes for her family and vouches for them. This book is clear, practical, and the author has had many years of perfecting the recipes for his favorite Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and North African dishes. I didn't find it intimidating at all.

By the way, after researching various models, I chose the Kuhn Rikon 7.25 liter pressure cooker. This Swiss line, which comes in a variety of sizes and shapes, has been called by the NY Times "The Mercedes of pressure cookers" and is renowned for quality and excellent customer service. For cooking grains and legumes, I also got an Ohsawa Pot, a lidded ceramic pot that fits inside.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Easing the Pressure, September 1, 2002

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I "I" - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Ultimate Pressure Cooker Cookbook: More Than 85 Foolproof Irresistible Recipes Tested in All the Most Popular Models (Hardcover)

Tom LaCalamita is The Italian Pressure Gourmet. Some cookbooks are, as a friend, full of information and some are simply filled with dependable recipes that are easy to prepare and delicious; This cookbook is both.

I find the exact ingrediants are important to the final finish. When I don't know what a particular ingredient is, I ask GOOGLE. For instance: I found that Italian frying peppers are simply very special in themselves as such, but that you can substitute yellow sweet peppers and be very close.

I enjoy the book. It helps a great deal with simple, easy to follow directions, in making the pressure cooker a normal method of cooking without emotional pressure.