How to Use the Converter Above
A pressure cooker can turn a long oven braise into something ready in a fraction of the time. A 90-minute pot roast in the oven is roughly 30 minutes under pressure. The converter above works out that pressure time from your oven time, or the reverse if you want to take a pressure recipe back to the oven for a better finish. Here is how to use it, and just as important, where a pressure cooker is the wrong tool.
The quick version
For dishes that suit pressure cooking, braises, stews, tough cuts of meat, and beans, the pressure time is about one third of the oven time. So divide your oven minutes by three as a rough starting point. The tool does that and adjusts for your cooker type and food.
Step by step
1. Pick your direction. Most people want Oven to Pressure Cooker, turning an oven time into a pressure time. If you want to go the other way, for browning and a better crust, flip to Pressure Cooker to Oven.
2. Choose your cooker type. This matters. Stovetop pressure cookers run at about 15 psi and cook faster. Electric ones, like an Instant Pot, run lower, around 11 psi, so they need a little more time. Pick the one you have and the tool adjusts. This applies in both directions.
3. Choose your food. Pick the closest match. Braises and stews are the baseline, meat and beans take a little longer, and vegetables cook fastest. Three of the choices are honest dead ends, and that is on purpose. More on those below.
4. Read your result. You get a pressure time as a range, with your cooker type shown so you can see which assumption produced it. A range is more honest than a single number, because pressure cooking is not exact.
A few things worth knowing
A pressure cooker cannot brown, crisp, or bake. This is the big one. A pressure cooker cooks with wet steam under pressure, so it physically cannot give you a crust, a crisp edge, or a bake. If you pick a fried or crispy food, a baked good, or a roast where the crust is the point, the tool will not give you a time. It tells you what to use instead. For some of those, there is a great hybrid: pressure-cook the meat for tenderness, then finish it in a hot oven or under the broiler to build color and bark. The tool suggests that where it helps.
Pressure cookers need liquid. A pressure cooker needs at least about a cup of liquid to come up to pressure at all. Ovens let liquid cook off, but a pressure cooker does not, so if your oven recipe is fairly dry, add liquid to that minimum and expect a wetter result you can reduce down afterward.
The timer is not the whole story. The time the tool gives you is the time at pressure. On top of that, the cooker takes several minutes to build pressure before the timer starts, and the food keeps cooking while the pressure releases. So the total time is longer than the number shown, though still much faster than the oven.
Add vegetables near the end. Vegetables turn to mush under pressure if they go in at the start. Cook the meat or beans first, release the pressure, add the vegetables, then cook a few more minutes. The tool reminds you when you pick vegetables.
Why you can trust the numbers
Straight up: I am a developer, not a chef, so I did not guess these. The divide-by-three baseline comes from published cooking sources, the stovetop versus electric difference is well documented, and the wrong-tool list comes from cooks who know what a pressure cooker ruins. I list all of these on the How We Calculate page. I will be honest about one part: the small per-food adjustments follow standard guidance in direction, but the exact size is my own conservative call, and I say so openly.
And for anything with meat, please use a thermometer and check it has reached a safe internal temperature. A timer says probably done. A thermometer says safe to eat.
Your turn
Give it a try with whatever you are cooking and see how it goes. What did you convert, and did the timing work out? Leave a comment below. Your real results help other home cooks, and they help me improve the tool. And if a conversion did not go the way you expected, tell me what you were making and I will look into it.
