How to Use a Microwave Pressure Cooker

If you enjoy using your pressure cooker and like the convenience of a microwave, knowing how to use a microwave pressure cooker can give you the best of both worlds if done correctly, letting you cook food even quicker.

As long as you follow some basic guidelines issued by the best microwaves, a high-quality microwave pressure cooker is easy to use and produces the same results, just remember there are always some inherent safety concerns when using some materials and methods in the microwave.

Using a Microwave Pressure Cooker

A pressure cooker, or crockpot as it’s sometimes called, cooks food by using steam inside a sealed cooking compartment to build up steam pressure, a cooking method that produces delicious food quickly without drying it out or burning it.

They’re a popular choice for a lot of home cooks for everything from split peas to cooking basmati rice in minutes or cooking a tough ingredient like raw beans in under an hour, but they’re effective for just about anything, and excel at quickly cooking healthy meals. They’re a convenient choice for making a lot of your favorite dishes.

Microwave pressure cookers, like all microwaves, work by heating the water molecules in food, they’re perfectly compatible, as long as you’re careful- in fact since microwaves themselves don’t get hot, they’re arguably even safer. Some microwaves will even let you use pressure cookers with microwave features like microwave sensor cooking for even more control over your meal.

Pressure Cooker Normal Use

For most uses, you have to wait for the pressure cooker to heat up (whether it’s a standalone electric unit or an oven pressure cooker) before putting your food dishes in and adding the lid, which is why most pressure cookers have a removable cooking pot. After that, you need to allow it to cook your food at a specific pressure level and for a fairly specific amount of time, so you’ll need to find pressure cooker recipes specific to what you’re cooking.

Fortunately, there are plenty of pressure cooker cooking charts available online that will show you pressure levels and cook times for a variety of different foods. Once you’ve preheated the pressure cooker and put your food in and lid on, you can generally just leave it alone until it’s done.

Using a Microwave Pressure Cooker

First of all, it may be obvious but is nonetheless important to point out that anything cooked in a microwave can’t have any metal components, which traditional and electric pressure cookers generally do. For this reason, the only really viable option is to use a microwave cooker, whose design and materials are expressly for use in a microwave and nothing else.

Apart from that, pressure cooking in a microwave has one major difference from using a traditional pressure cooker- a microwave pressure cooker starts cooking food immediately, making it even quicker than conventional pressure cooking. Keeping that in mind, the following guidelines should be observed:

• Never use less than the recommended amount of water than the recipe calls for. Superheated water can result in a buildup of pressure resulting in steam burns, explosions, or just heating the pressure cooker to levels unsafe for handling, even if only touching a handle.
• Never use oil in place of water in a recipe- serious burns and damage to the pressure cooker itself can easily occur.
• Most microwave pressure cookers are dishwasher safe, but always check to make sure they’re specifically designated as such.
• Follow recommended cook times for microwave pressure cookers closely- cooking food for too long will dry it out and can cause superheated water to damage the cooker and cause steam burns.
• Pay attention to the microwave wattage level that recipes are designed for and the wattage of the pressure cooker itself and adjust cook times accordingly. Most microwave pressure cookers are designed to be used with 900W microwaves.
• Microwave cooking time calculation per wattage can be a little tricky because the difference in cooking times lowers as the microwave wattage goes up. A 1000W microwave may only require an additional 30 seconds of cook time for a 5 minute cook time for a 1100W microwave, whereas a 700W microwave will need an additional 5-7 minutes. When in doubt, be conservative in your adjustments- it’s better to have to add more time than to have overcooked your food.

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