Pressure Cookers - Going Green in the Kitchen |
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Earth Day and the Pressure Cooker |
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What's on This Page |
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Energy Saving = Money Saved |
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According to one study, the average family in the United States spends about $1,300 a year on home utility bills. This is roughly 75% more energy than a family living in the countries of Europe. The average household uses 775 kWh of energy annually for cooking, and for a typical household that can cost as much as $150 each year, or about 6.5 percent of the average home's consumption of electricity, which generates up to 1.5 tons of greenhouse gases. A pressure cooker is a tried and true energy saver by reducing the costs of cooking fuel because food takes much less time to cook. Then there's the savings you get from not having to run the A/C as much during the summer because the pressure cooker isn't going to heat up your kitchen like conventional cooking methods do. Air conditioners often use one unit of energy for each three units of heat they remove from your house, so that's a big cost saver for you, plus that energy reduction also means less smoggy air and reduced greenhouse gas emissions from the power plants used to generate all that electricity. Minimizing the demand for energy through conservation and efficiency is the most cost effective means of reducing your operational and environmental costs, and that's a win-win-win deal! |
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Cheap Eats = Big Savings |
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Even the toughest cuts of meat, which are inexpensive, but often avoided because of their lengthy cooking times, can be cooked in a modern pressure cooker in about 30 minutes instead of 3 hours. The drastically decreased cooking time insures that you will use much less energy than it would take to cook the same meal by steaming, boiling, braising, or roasting. The shorter cooking times also help retain more of the vitamins and nutrients in the food, meaning that you get the most bang for the buck for your food buying dollar with lower grocery bills. Use the pressure cooker to cook an entire meal of several courses on only one burner and you'll quickly see a substantial fuel savings in fuel costs... and that's great for your wallet and the environmental concerns that we all have as good citizens and stewards of our world. Consider that a gas stove generates about one kilogram of greenhouse gas for every 10 liters of water boiled, and a modern pressure cooker requires as little as 1/2 cup water to cook using superheated steam , so we can even economize on water usage. Less water is loss to evaporation, and there is less water need to prepare several foods in combination such as one-pot and multi-course meals. The versatile pressure cooker is also a multi-purpose pot that takes the place of expensive rice and vegetable steamers, Dutch ovens, braising pans and stock pots. If all this sound like a bargain… what are you waiting for? Get a modern pressure cooker at Amazon. |
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How Much Can a Pressure Cooker Save You? |
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Tuesday, April 22nd 2008 is celebrated as Earth Day. You don't need to make a radical change to start going green. Even a small change, like shifting more of your day to day cooking to the pressure cooker can show tangible results in saving energy, and that translates into real money savings for you. 
One of main advantages of cooking with a modern pressure cooker is that it allows you to tackle recipes like high protein dried beans, peas and lentils, that would take hours to cook by other means, candbe cooked in as little as 9 to 20 minutes. 