Why does food from a pressure cooker taste flat?

This is the most common complaint about pressure cooking and it is entirely fixable, because the causes are structural rather than a matter of skill. A sealed pot removes two of the three things that normally build flavour in a braise, so you have to supply both deliberately.

Step by step

1. Brown far more thoroughly than you think you need to.Under pressure nothing browns at all, so every roasted, savoury note in the finished dish has to be created before the lid goes on. Brown the meat in batches until it is properly dark, not just grey with a hint of colour, and let the onions go past soft into golden. In a multicooker this is worth doing in a separate frying pan, because the sauté function is weak.
2. Deglaze and get every bit of the fond in.The stuck brown residue is concentrated flavour, and if it stays on the base it will also trigger a burn warning under pressure. Pour in wine, stock or water and scrape the base clean with a wooden spoon before sealing.
3. Cut the liquid hard.A conventional braise recipe assumes an hour or more of evaporation. A pressure cooker loses almost none. Use only what the machine needs to generate steam and not catch — often 250–350ml where the original recipe said a litre. Meat and vegetables release a surprising amount of their own liquid on top of that.
4. Reduce with the lid off afterwards.If it is still thin when the pressure comes down, take the lid off, put it on the sauté setting or on the hob, and boil it down. Ten minutes of hard reduction transforms a watery pressure-cooked sauce and is the single most effective fix here.
5. Season at the end, not at the start.Salt levels that were right for a litre of liquid are wrong once it has reduced by half, and pressure cooking concentrates nothing while it runs and then everything when you reduce. Taste and adjust after the reduction, and expect to need more acid — a squeeze of lemon or a splash of vinegar — than you would in an open braise.
6. Add the delicate flavours after the pressure stage.Fresh herbs, garlic, citrus zest, chilli and most spices lose their top notes under a long hot hold. Put the robust ones in at the start — bay, thyme stalks, whole spices — and stir the fresh ones in during the reduction, off the heat or in the last minute.
7. Do not overcook the meat.Flat-tasting is sometimes really texture: meat pushed too far under pressure falls into fibres and loses the resistance that makes it satisfying. Time it to the recipe rather than adding a safety margin, and use natural release for larger pieces so they are not shocked.

Tips

• A tablespoon of tomato purée fried in with the onions until it darkens, or a spoonful of miso, soy or Worcestershire sauce stirred in at the end, adds savoury depth that the sealed pot could not create.
• Natural release keeps more aroma in the pot than quick release, which vents a great deal of the volatile flavour into the room. Use quick release when you need to stop the cooking, natural release otherwise.
• If the sauce is thin but you do not want to reduce it, a slurry of cornflour stirred in on the sauté setting thickens it — but it thickens without concentrating, so it fixes the body and not the taste.

Common mistakes

• Following a conventional recipe's liquid quantity — It is written for a pot that will lose half of it. In a sealed cooker you end up with a stew swimming in dilute liquid and a sauce that tastes of nothing.
• Skipping the browning because the machine has a sauté button and you are in a hurry — The browning is the flavour. Pressure cooking gives you tenderness and nothing else — every savoury note has to be there before the lid closes.

Questions people ask