obviously cooking on very high heat is faster but it wouldn’t mean you could have a huge hunk of meat nice and tender in a couple hours. but why. i don’t even understand enough to know if i chose the right flair.
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Steam carries a LOT of heat.
Heat a pot of water on the stove top. Take its temperature and you’ll see it ramp up evenly till it hits 100°C. There it will sit, sucking up heat, for a surprisingly long time, before it starts to boil. The heat it has taken in is sometimes called “latent heat.”
The resulting steam carries this latent heat and delivers it to whatever object it comes into contact with, so long as the object is cooler than 100°C. That’s why steam heating systems work, and that’s why steam cooks stuff fast.
In a pressure cooker, the food is trapped in the vessel with the steam, and new steam is constantly being made. That’s already going to do a great job of cooking many foods. The pressure adds to the effect by allowing the steam to be at a higher temperature. Instead of 100° it’ll get to 125° or so. This is a great temperature to break down connective tissue in many cuts of meat without causing the meat to seize. For veggies or beans the higher temperature speeds the cooking tremendously even though the food is just being boiled or steamed.
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