It is always a very nice idea to have a pressure cooker around so that you do not bother yourself with having to attend to the particular food you are cooking from time to time. This article is about most common pressure cooker problems that people make which tends to affect the performance of the equipment. Such inconveniences are totally eliminated when one uses a pressure cooker in preparing his or her meal.
Although it is a known fact that pressure cookers do present an individual with a lot of benefits when they are used in cooking, it is very disheartening to also find out that not all people are able to get the best out of their pressure cookers mainly due to their own doings.
Opening the lid of the pressure cooker whilst the food is not well cooked
This is something that the majority of pressure cooker users always fall foul of as they are fond of doing that they moment they decide to cook with the pressure cooker. This is something that should never be practiced as you will be notified the moment your food is well cooked. However, a lot of people are unable to follow this simple rule and tend to open the lid to see for themselves if the food is well cooked or not. Well, if you can really do it yourself why don’t you go in for a cooking bowl and do your cooking there. Opening the lid whilst the food is not yet cooked prolongs the time it would have taken the pressure cooker to get the food well cooked. This is due to the fact that pressure cookers use the steam that is trapped inside to cook the food and so when you open the lid you allow the steam to evaporate meaning it will have to generate another steam in order to get the food well cooked.
Inappropriate locking of the lid
However sad this may sound, it is very common to find people using a pressure cooker to cook with the lid not properly fitted. This is a mistake which provides you with either a badly cooked food or a prolonged cooking time as the steam that are needed in the pressure cooker to cook the food is allowed to escape through the openings at those places where the lid is not properly fitted. When you realise that the lid of your pressure cooker does not fit properly, just go in for a new one in order to save yourself the trouble of having to wait for longer periods just to get a particular food cooked.
Cooking of foods with different cooking times at the same time
This is something that almost each and every one has done before. Different foods with varied cooking times are cooked together in a single pressure cooker at the same time. Doing this gives you two main outcomes – having one food overcooked and also having the other undercooked. Whichever one you are provided with, you can be certain of one thing – you won’t enjoy the food that you have prepared at all. It is therefore necessary to always make sure that the foods that you have in the pressure cooker have the same cooking time so that when you switch it off, you will have exactly what you need.
Purchasing cheap pressure cookers
There is no substitute for a quality thing. However, it is very common to see people purchasing low standard pressure cookers mainly because their prices are cheap. Well, being so cheap offers you one thing and that is a pressure cooker that is way below the standard size of a normal pressure cooker. This makes it impossible for you to cook certain quantities of food at a go and it also leads to the lids not closing well as a result of so many ingredients in the cooker.
The use of wrong cooking recipes
There is the notion that whatever you put into a pressure cooker will definitely get cooked. This has led a lot of people to use murder the proper way of cooking certain kinds of foods by going with a totally different and unacceptable one. The essence of having a food recipe is to help you maintain the nutritional value of the food that you are preparing and also to ensure that each of the ingredients gets its fair share of cooking time. However, a lot of people with pressure cookers just add all the ingredients together and put them into the container, cover it and turn it on. The end result is badly cooked foods with no nutritional values. It is therefore very essential to always follow the appropriate way of cooking a particular dish in order to get the best taste and also keep most of the nutrients intact after cooking.
These are some of the most common pressure cooker problems that are committed by people day in and day out.