E-Book Review: Healthy Pressure Cooker Recipes by Pavel Krinitskiy

E-Book Review: Healthy Pressure Cooker Recipes by Pavel Krinitskiy Review

Buy it at Amazon: E-Book Review: Healthy Pressure Cooker Recipes by Pavel Krinitskiy [Affiliate Link]

Takeaway: Consists of "borrowed" recipes from the internet, misleading stock photos, and questionable nutrition info.

First off, I should acknowledge that the recipes in this book are high quality, chef-tested, and make some delicious and for the most part healthy meals (this is subjective based on your dietary needs and preferences, of course). The recipes range from all walks of international, fusion, and home cooking cuisines. What you should know, however, is that every recipe in this book can also be found on well-known cooking blogs, magazines, and publications readily available for free on the internet. What that means is that while you'll get high quality recipes from reputable sources, chefs, and cooking experts, none of them appear to be acknowledged for their contribution or creations.

A quick search of the ingredients and dish names will turn up the exact recipes found in this book elsewhere on the internet, for example, Health Starts in the Kitchen's Chipotle Chicken Black Beans and Rice recipe appears on page 10/11, MamaLatinaTips' Beef Barbacoa recipe is on page 12/13, and Cooking Light's Prosecco and Parmesan Risotto is on pages 14/15 and so on. The recipes are reproduced in this book with the exact same ingredients and proportions. To the author's credit, he did keep most of the recipes intact without changing the measurements or dropping any ingredients. In most cases the order of the ingredients was simply switched up and occasionally there was an insertion of a small quantity of an aromatic, possibly to make the recipe appear, but not taste, entirely different.

The author did attempt to standardize and condense the steps by using the same terminology and generic pressure cooker settings in each recipe. However, I was disappointed that the photos that accompany each recipe were not representative of the dish as these were also stock images found from around the internet. For example, the first photo of the Spinach and Tomato Quiche, shows it in a quiche pan with a pastry crust, but the recipe instructs you to use a casserole dish and the recipe is for a crustless quiche; clearly not the one depicted in the photo. My biggest pet peeve was the lack of consistency and personality throughout the book. Cookbooks should be more than just lists of ingredients and 4 or 5 steps to complete them. I've always enjoyed reading cookbooks because the authors share their expertise, tips and tricks in the kitchen, and meaningful stories about food with the readers. Without those touches, it is dry, impersonal, and simply an "index card" recipe box, which may be useful for some folks, but hardly makes for a good read. The paragraph leading into each recipe reads like a fluff advertisement with little insight or substance to what you'll be making. Also, because the recipes come from different chefs with different preferences in ingredients choices, there's a bit of inconsistency in how ingredients are called out, for example, in two different recipes you'll find an ingredient listed as "Beef Chuck Roast" versus "Canadian Beef Chuck Roast" - which is simply a branded product as the original recipe was sponsored by a company called "Canadian Beef" on the blog where it first appeared. Really? You didn't remove the branding from a sponsored post when copying the recipe? Or was the branding simply not clear because you didn't read the entire original recipe and, not being a chef, didn't know that Canadian Beef Chuck Roast is not its own separate thing? The editing for this book just feels rushed, lazy, and sloppy.

Which brings me to my next point. It's unlikely the author has personally re-created each and every one of these recipes in his own pressure cooker. That's a shame because it means that while the author trusted the original recipe's creator to their skill and talent, he also used their recipes without giving them credit. I'm also doubtful of the authenticity of the nutritional information found at the end of each recipe. For example calories are "measured" in Grams at the end of each recipe which makes no sense because a calorie IS a unit of measurement for energy. It is not something that can be measured by mass. As for protein and carbohydrate content, most of the original recipes didn't even have this sort of information to begin with, so at best, without scientific measurement, these figures are estimated and at worst, simply random numbers.

So in summary, the recipes are fine, and I'm sure if you follow them you'll get some fantastic ideas and dishes out of them because they are created by real chefs with real talent. However, be aware that this book is simply a collection of publicly available recipes collected from around the internet, which are free. All it saves you is a bit of time researching and reading recipes for pressure cookers. If what you're looking for is just a boxed set of short, easy-to-follow pressure cooker recipes, this book might actually be useful, as long as you don't mind the false imagery/advertisement, questionable nutritional information, and quasi-intellectual property infringement of talented and creative cooks.

Buy it at Amazon: E-Book Review: Healthy Pressure Cooker Recipes by Pavel Krinitskiy [Affiliate Link]