The Great Big Prssure Cooker Book by Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough

The Great Big Pressure Cooker Book by Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough is a huge book just like the title suggests with 500 recipes in it.  These recipes range from the expected pork roast recipes to the unexpected cheesecake recipes.  This book begins with encouragement and instructions on the use of the pressure cooker.  It also begins with how to change the recipe and the rules to follow as well as the hard and fast rules to follow and never break-don't fill past the 2/3 mark for some recipes and which recipes to only fill to the halfway point for instance.  It includes seasoning and how the pressure cooker will treat seasonings and salt.  It includes trouble shooting-why your roast is tough or scorched and how to prevent it from happening or in the case of toughness how to fix it.  There is not just one recipe on for instance pork roast but many variations and not only that but many on cheese cake if you can believe that.  This is the only pressure cooker cookbook that you will ever need.

I loved this cookbook.  It gave me the courage to actually use the pressure cooker that I have owned for years but never used for fear that I would blow up the ceiling in the kitchen.  This book shows me exactly how to avoid disaster.  Now I am a person who has been canning for years but still for some reason was afraid to try pressure cooking with my pressure pan.  Now I know that this makes no sense but who can figure out fears?  So I guess my favorite parts of the book are not the recipes but actually the beginning parts which actually got me to use my pressure pan.  One of the best parts about the recipes is that following each and every one is "tester's notes" which tell the user how to improve it/change it to meet your own needs, why some of the ingredients are important and possibly the best part a good description of the flavor of the food which is being prepared.  This cookbook also tells in each recipe how to cook if you have the stovetop variety of pan or the newer electric type of pressure pan.   Get his book if you have the slightest inkling that you would life to pressure cook--even before buying the pan.
I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review.