I often cook rice or beans in a light weight stainless steel bowl with a folded band of aluminum foil under it to lift bowl when food cooked. Water is added to the bottom of the pot, a rack inserted, and foil covers bowl and contents. If the rice bean calls for 2 cups water to one cup rice or beans, I add that to bowl before covering it with foil. I also season bowl before doing this. Reason - I am a 2 person family. If I want to cook rice or beans for one meal, I cannot cook this small amount in my 6 quart Presto cooker. Cooking it in a bowl means I can still cook my rice or beans in 7 to 15 minutes, remove the stainless bowl and present for serving, and dump and rinse out the Presto in half a minute. No chances of drying out or burning small quantities of food on the bottom of my Presto. This higher and better use of a pressure cooker comes from Miss Vickie. Her cookbook on pressure cooking is wonderful. Her advise is given freely and well thought out also (on her website). Just my observations based on implementation. Jim in So Calif

I've used a pressure cooker for over 35 years, and am so dependent on it that I always had one in my travel trailer as well as my own kitchen. My daughters both own one; one daughter uses hers as often as I do. Believe it or not, she requested one for a birthday present while she was still in college! The other one reluctantly took the one from her grandma's RV (after they sold their RV), and now really likes using it. Roasts -- chili -- spaghetti sauce -- sirloin tip steaks -- are just a few of the things I make in mine. It's used at least once a week. I currently have a Presto stainless steel whose handle has loosened too much to use, so I am using the Mirror aluminum model that used to be in my travel trailer. Donna

I use mine for stuff that normally needs hours of cooking, so that exact timing isn't needed. For example, if I'm making oxtail or beef shank, it doesn't make a difference if I pressure cook it for 1 h or 1 h 15 m, because normally it doesn't make a difference if you cook it (w/o pressure cooker) for 3 h or 3 h 45 m. There is occasionally stuff that can be cooked in a shorter time, but where the exact time still doesn't matter. An example is making a quickie chicken stock, brown the carcass and add water + veg, then high pressure for 20 m (1 h w/o pressure) - but if I get distracted so it turns out to be 30 m (1 h 30 m w/o pressure), it doesn't matter. I recall once investigating the feasibility of a temperature probe that could be placed into meat inside the PC, and transmit a reading to a gauge outside the PC. I didn't find anything.

I do think traditional risotto is a little better, but to be honest I am not sure I could reliably tell the difference in a blind test. You know how, when making traditional risotto, the creamy quality doesn't start to emerge until rather late in the process? For most of the procedure, you're just stirring hard little rice pebbles that couldn't care less about creamy. With the pressure cooker risotto, you do stir it, but you're stirring at the end, when the rice is ready to get creamy. There is a pragmatic benefit too - if you're juggling lots of courses at once and the clock is ticking, either you do the risotto early when you have time and then it sits and sits, turning into cold paste, or you do it at the end when you're struggling to watch the broiler, tend the deep fryer, work the wok, or whatever foolish mess you've gotten yourself into. Neither is really ideal. With the pressure cooker, you crank the heat 30 minutes before the dinner bell, at T -15 you unseal the cooker, throw in a knob of butter, stir vigorously, adjust moisture and salt and pepper, by T -10 your risotto is done and you've only spent 5 minutes of the crucial "last hour" on this side dish. It is not elegant but it works.