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

by Victoria Wise

Book Overview

The Pressure Cooker Gourmet is by far the most creative collection of recipes available for this remarkable appliance. It gives you vast new possibilities for weekday cooking and expanded creative options for weekends, helping you prepare wonderful stews, roasts, and other traditionally labor-intensive dishes in a matter of minutes. Make these fantastic recipes and more in a fraction of the usual time Quick Chicken with Garlic, Tarragon, and Red Wine...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1558322019
• ISBN13: 9781558322011
• Release Date: December 2004
• Publisher: Harvard Common Press
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 7.3" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Excellent gourmet recipes for a pressure cooker!

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!

Absolutely delicious!

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!

great book

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.

Will prove a real time saver when serving up dishes

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!

Old World Flavor in a Fraction of the Time!!!

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!!