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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So water boils at 100 degrees C, everyone knows that. What you may not know is that it is impossible for liquid water to ever get *hotter* than 100 degrees C. At that point, applying more heat energy will just make it convert to steam more rapidly, but only in the vapor form can it get hotter than boiling point.
That is, at normal sea-level air pressure that’s all true. If you increase the pressure, you increase the temperature of the boiling point and thus increase what is essentially the maximum temperature you can get your food to, and that’s what makes it cook faster.
Of course, this affect mostly only works when cooking something immersed in water or a mostly-water liquid (which is pretty much anything you would cook with other than fat) like soups, stews, or brazes. There is no physical effect that keeps air or metal from getting hotter than 100C so baking or grilling under pressure wouldn’t really do anything.
All this is the same reason that frying food in oil is so different than boiling it in water. Frying is done at much higher temperatures, usually 200C or more, which is not physically possible with water (unless the air pressure were around 20 bars). If you “fry” something in 100C oil the results will be very different.
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