Do chefs use pressure cookers? The average chef doesn’t keep a pressure cooker in the kitchen. A large part of the reasoning comes from the scale of the operations. Chefs must cook large quantities of food that won’t fit in a pressure cooker. Some restaurants have adopted them to save time but most haven’t. 

If you’d like to learn more about chefs and the use of pressure cookers, keep reading. We will look at this topic from multiple angles to understand it better.

Chefs didn’t use pressure cookers in the past, but because of the accelerated cooking speed and new safety features, more chefs have begun to use pressure cookers. Restaurants fulfill orders faster while freeing up the burners for other foods. The high demand requires that restaurants keep two pressure cookers or more in the kitchen.

They might seek out a large commercial pressure cooker to meet the demands. The rising popularity of chefs using pressure cookers also comes from how some top-name chefs like Chef Sang Yoon and Chef Heston Blumenthal have praised the benefits. Chef Heston Blumenthal writes about them regularly and says pressure cookers develop a fuller flavor in terms of depth and complexity, but they also offer clarity.

You rarely see pressure cookers used on TV, but they could soon adopt a more important role. The continued improvements to cooking technology, such as saving 50 percent on energy and halving the cooking time have all contributed to their growing popularity.

On top of that, pressure cookers include more safety features than before. In the past, it wasn’t uncommon to hear about pressure cookers exploding. Today, the average pressure cooker has 10 or more safety features.

Overcoming Disdain from Professional Chefs

While we painted a rosy picture that some chefs have adopted the pressure cooker, we would like to point out how most still won’t use them in the restaurant. They turn their noses up at them and think of pressure cookers as overly simplistic cooking. Tom Aikens, an English Michelin-starred chef, was one of them. A large majority, not just him, still holds this opinion.

Professionals would likely cook the foods that taste best in the pressure cooker. Some examples of foods like this include:

• Chicken thighs
• Whole chickens
• Pork chops
• Rump roast
• Dried beans
• Brown rice
• Bulgur
• Potatoes
• Squash
• Carrots
• Beets
• Soup
• Stews

Back in the 1950s, pressure cookers held a well-earned reputation for exploding, which may even contribute to the dislike for them to this day. In a busy kitchen, you can’t afford to neglect the pressure cooker for a second.