

Mediterranean Tofu With Bell Pepper Sauce. (Dixie D. Vereen/For The Washington Post)

When I was growing up in the 1970s in West Texas, my mother loved her pressure cooker. And the one food I most clearly remember her preparing in it is . . . broccoli.

Broccoli, in the pressure cooker? Remember, this was back when Americans didn’t know about cooking green vegetables to crisp-tender, so I didn’t think anything of her super-soft broccoli until much later, when my tastes had evolved. So my own experience with pressure cooking has been limited to things that take much longer than broccoli to cook: tough cuts of meat, back when I ate such things, and whole grains and beans, now that they’re such an important part of my diet.

Every now and then, though, I meet true pressure-cooker evangelists. These are the folks who can’t believe that in this day and age, when so many of us complain about how little time we have to get dinner on the table, more of us don’t make this type of cooking part of our weekly routine. The devices, after all, are much improved — that is, much safer — than they were in my mother’s kitchen, and probably yours as well.

[More on pressure cookers: Do I need special recipes; take the pressure off dinner]

I think the resistance has something to do with a loss of control. When I close up the cooker, bring it to pressure and let it do its thing, I hate not knowing exactly what’s happening in there and not being able to just lift off that lid. (I’m a fairly obsessive check-on-it-constantly kind of cook.) At least a lot of slow cookers — the other end of the speed spectrum, but similarly built for set-it-and-forget-it cooking — have glass lids.

The fact is, it’s pretty easy to stop the cooker, quick-release the pressure and open it up when you’re worried about overcooking, as Jill Nussinow — one of those evangelists — writes in “Vegan Under Pressure.” Her new book convinced me to take another look.

Because I’m already comfortable pressure-cooking beans and grains, I decided to try Nussinow’s suggestion for something that wouldn’t be all that time-consuming to cook in a conventional way. I was intrigued by her assertion that tofu firms up and absorbs more flavor when pressure-cooked, so I tested her recipe for Mediterranean Tofu With Bell Pepper Sauce. I bumped up the seasonings, looking for a little more zip, but was otherwise impressed by how the bell pepper softened nicely (in just three minutes) without turning to mush, how the tomato paste and herbs infused the tofu — and how the tofu’s texture improved, too.

Most important, I could tell that if I made pressure cooking more of a habit, I could start to absorb its unique rhythms. The starting, stopping, checking and restarting wouldn’t need to feel all that different from what I do in a saute pan — and the whole process would still be a good bit faster.