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Question

Why does it take less time to cook food in a pressure cooker

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Solution

Pressure cookers cook meals up to 70% faster than conventional methods. That seriously makes it not only a must-have for women who work all day and work-at-home moms, but for students as well.

A pressure cooker works on a simple principle: Steam pressure. A sealed pot, with a lot of steam inside, builds up high pressure, which helps food cook faster.

A pressure cooker is a sealed pot with a valve that controls the steam pressure inside. As the pot heats up, the liquid inside forms steam, which raises the pressure in the pot. This high-pressure steam has two major effects:

Raises the boiling point of the water in the pot. When cooking something wet, like a stew or steamed vegetables, the heat of your cooking is limited to the boiling point of water (100°C). But with the steam's pressure now the boiling point can get as high as 138°C. This higher heat helps the food to cook faster.
Raises the pressure, forcing liquid into the food. The high pressure also helps force liquid and moisture into the food quickly, which helps it cook faster and also helps certain foods, like tough meat, get very tender very quickly.

Pressure is the key. How?? The reason of using pressure cooker is to increase the pressure inside the system. We know that water boils at 100 deg Celsius at 1 atm (1.01235 bar) pressure. Does the boiling point limit of water changes with pressure? yes, it does. for example, water boils at 134 deg Celsius at 3 bar pressure. With this background we can analyse the above question,

  1. Pressure cookers require liquid to cook food under pressure, and it is a lid driven closed system.
  2. when heat is supplied to the pressure cooker, after boiling point of liquid, pressure rises tremendously which raises boiling point temperature.this is due to steam trapped with in the system and unable to escape from it. Hence pressure raises above atmospheric pressure. Remember that the final temperature of the liquid depends upon pressure inside the system. for ex: assume the final pressure is 3 bar, hence the liquid temperature has to be 134 deg Celsius for water.

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