ChefSteps is a team of chefs, writers, and food lovers who develop recipes, techniques, and guides to help people cook better at home.

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Once lauded as beacons of culinary convenience, pressure cookers fell out of favor as prepackaged foods began filling grocery store aisles and frozen, microwavable meals became de rigueur in homes across America. In fact, many Gen Xers and millennials grew up not really knowing what a pressure cooker does, though fans of cooking competition shows can’t miss their integral role on programs like Top Chef. Forced to innovate under severe time crunches, the wiliest contestants use pressure cookers to beat the clock, creating tender braises and flavor-packed stocks in the space of an hour while their panicky cohorts tinker with oven temps and stovetop burners, praying for a miracle.The conditions on such shows may be extreme, but most of us struggle with the same essential issue as those chefs-turned-TV-personalities: we’re so often short on time. A lazy Sunday is a lovely opportunity to slowly transform beef chuck into a tender pot roast, but as the week wears on, it gets trickier and trickier to assemble a great meal. And here’s where a pressure cooker comes in handy. These locked-lid pots are specially designed to drastically shorten the cook times of slow-poke foods like grains, legumes, potatoes, tough meat cuts, soups, and stews. Food cooked in a pressure cooker requires very little oversight, freeing you up to pay a few bills or chat with your kids until dinnertime. And they’re a great toy for the modernist mad scientist as well. You can soften pine nuts, for example, to give them a yielding, grainlike texture; combine vegetables with a little baking soda to break down their structure, creating a <a href="broccoli-puree">super-silky purée</a>; or <a href="pressure-cooked-bananas">caramelize fruits</a> and vegetables to deepen the flavors of classic dishes. Microwaves—and their ability to cook dinner in five minutes—may have surpassed pressure cookers as the go-to, no-fuss kitchen technology, but no culinary instrument rivals these pots when it comes to creating truly delicious, healthy foods quickly. Read on to learn about the history of pressure cookers and how they work, then get cracking with a host of recipes from our development kitchen. In this era of packed schedules and relentless expectations, every evening can feel like a Quickfire Challenge. Equipped with a pressure cooker, you’re going to win every time.