The asparagus is added at the very end of the process in this pressure cooker risotto.It’s been a few years since Judy Smith, service manager at the Northwest Georgia Trade and Convention Center, used a pressure cooker, but she remembers her mother using one for canning.
Smith says she has used one to cook a whole chicken, and it’s great for chuck roast as well.
“They are good, especially for things like pinto beans. [Without one] you had to soak them all day and night, but with a pressure cooker you don’t,” she says. “But you have to careful because you are cooking under pressure and they can explode. I think that’s why people have gone to slow cookers like Crock-Pots.”
There’s an ongoing fear of pressure cookers based on the cheap metal used to build them in the 1940s. Good metal was being used for World War II uses and pressure cookers became synonymous — deservedly so — for blowing off their lids.
Pressure cookers today are altogether tamer beasts, with sophisticated locking systems and valve mechanisms for releasing steam; electric pressure cookers adjust the heat automatically to maintain optimum temperature and pressure, and some even self-vent at the end of the preprogrammed cooking time.