Why I don't like pressure cookers

I forgot to tell you - I acquired a pressure cooker. A reasonable deal on Amazon - 50% off - but . . .

It's just as bad as they always used to be, except marginally less scary.

Now you may well have a pressure cooker and love it to bits but here's why I don't like them.

I've made two things with it, a chicken stock and some cannelini beans and both would have been better if I'd made them the conventional way.

The handbook advised me to cook my chicken carcasses for 40 (yes, forty) minutes which seemed an incredibly long time but as I hadn't used it before I took their word for it. Of course it came out cloudy and slightly bitter-tasting. Better when it was skimmed but I ended up - most unfrugally - throwing it away.

The beans, I was told, didn't have to be pre-soaked, simply submerged in boiling water for an hour which seemed like a good time-saving notion but it was far from clear how long they needed to be cooked.

The handbook didn't mention them. It recommended 5 minutes for haricot beans, 10 minutes for small butter beans and 15 for kidney beans to which cannelini beans are related. I decided to give them 12 and found they'd started to fall apart when I opened the cooker.

I also thought they were less digestible than usual though that may be my imagination or general grumpiness about the whole enterprise.

I'll give it another go but if all else fails at least I've got a large saucepan for cooking pasta.

Unless you're pulse-mad and cook them a couple times a week from scratch I wouldn't bother.