Made a couple of recipes. Followed the directions to a t. Nowhere close to "perfection" as the title claims. Very disappointing. America's test kitchen used to be very thorough and exacting. These recipes are not. Returned for a refund.

We bought this at the same time we purchased our first pressure cooker. While it does not offer a huge selection of recipes, it does offer a very nice variety in enough different categories to get you started. The tips and advice they offer really helped me to feel comfortable using the pressure cooker as I had no experience with one before. It offers directions for both standard and electric pressure cookers and also gives advice for doubling many of the recipes, which has come in very handy for our family of five. This is a great book for anyone with a new pressure cooker and every recipe we've tried has turned out excellently!

My son loves to cook (and I hate to cook), so I buy all the gadgets & books, and he makes stuff. If you have never used a pressure cooker before, let your fears of being scalded by an exploding metal cooking device be calmed--it doesn't happen. It took a few weeks for him to decide to make the attempt, and now he loves cooking with a pressure cooker, and the results are fantastic. I got him this cookbook. The recipes are out of this world, especially the pork ragout!

The America's Test Kitchen crew doesn't do anything half-basted, and their pressure cooker recipe book is no exception. Every single recipe includes not only step-by-step instructions, with detailed descriptions and pictures of the food, and how it needs to be prepared, but for their pressure cooking book they also include the "why this recipe works" section for each and every recipe.

While of course there are lots of recipes in this book with meat, and I like to say that I'm a "vegetarian with vegan rising", there are still plenty of recipes in this book to make it worth my while, *especially* because of the detailed instructions and explanations (I can't wait to make the Chickpea and Artichoke Tagine!) Plus, the information and directions for each recipe are so detailed, that once you've mastered a dish you will find that you actually know how to make many more such dishes.

I bought this to use with my new Instant Pot electric pressure cooker, and do be warned that this cookbook came out in 2013, before the Instant Pot wave. They review several stovetop pressure cookers in the beginning of the book, a few of which they recommend highly, and four electric ones (but no Instant Pot), none of which they recommend, so their bias is clearly for stovetop, but don't let that daunt you if you have an electric pressure cooker. (Their way of testing the sauté function of the electric pressure cookers was by cooking crepes in them to see if they heated evenly!) However, probably because of this bias, they don't have separate instructions in the recipes for electric pressure cookers, but it's *ok*! Each recipe has some variation of "bring to high pressure, then adjust heat to medium *to keep at high pressure*", and that 'keep at high pressure' is the key for your electric pressure cooker (if you have one). Don't worry about the "adjust the heat" part, just pay attention to the amount of time you need to cook the dish at high pressure, and program your Instant Pot (or other electric pressure cooker) accordingly.

Seriously, if this Instant-Pot-owning-vegetarian raves about this book, then anyone else ought to L-O-V-E it!

So why only 4 stars? That's Amazon's and the USPS' fault. Amazon has started shipping soft cover books with the US Post Office instead of UPS, and in soft envelopes. And guess what the USPS does with them? ROLLS THEM UP and SHOVES THEM in my mailbox! That is how the last four of them have been delivered. It's a travesty, I tell ya.

If you're using an electric pressure cooker, you should probably steer clear of this cookbook. For instance, several recipes call for adding flour prior to pressure cooking. If you add flour prior to cooking under pressure with an electric pressure cooker, you will probably never get to pressure as the flour will settle on the bottom of the pot, burn, and keep the liquid from boiling properly and thus coming to pressure.

Additionally, the suggestions for altering recipes for electric pressure cookers are generally off. As an example, why set a separate timer rather than using the cooker's timer? The timer on my electric cooker starts as soon as the pot comes to pressure so there's no need to start a separate cooker at that time as the book suggests.

For context, I've been cooking with modern pressure cookers for nearly twenty years. I've done so with two stovetop cookers--Kuhn Rikon and Fissler--and now recently with an Instant Pot, an electric model. Also, I've subscribed to Cook's Illustrated since the 1990s and I'm generally a fan of their work--including America's Test Kitchen. Nonetheless, this cookbook is a failure. There are many better pressure cooker books out there. See, for example, Hip Pressure Cooking and those by Lorna Sass.

Edit: After I wrote the above, I wondered if I'd missed something about this book as Cook's Illustrated and America's Test Kitchen have been such great resources for me. To my surprise, I found that I'd missed how truly flawed the book is!

Via a web search that included the book's title and then added the word errors, I read multiple reviews that clearly and precisely layed out the major flaws--timings too long and too short, too much water when cooking beans, the thickener error I noted above, and the list goes on.

Bottom line, all pressure cooker owners--whether stovetop or electric--should avoid this book. It simply fails on too many levels.