Pressure Cooker Issue

Sounds like your pressure cooker is electric. Mine gets heat from the stove top. I sear the meat then add the liquid, seal the lid, and heat it up to pressure all in the same pot without a cooling cycle.

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Anyone else have an issue with their pressure cooker when going from brown/saute mode to pressure cooking mode and the unit overheating and shutting off automatically? The manual says I need to allow the unit to cool completely before going to pressure cook mode.

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The vapor pressure of water at 15 psig (max pressure your electric cooker is going to hold) is 250F. Sauteeing/browning takes place around 100 degrees above that. The unit is sensing temperature and pressure to control the unit. They provide redundant backups to each other because if you know the temperature of something at saturation, you also can calculate the pressure and vice versa. The pressure cooker assumes that water is what's going to be saturated in the pot, so based on the properties of water, if it senses either the temperature or the pressure going too high in pressure mode, it'll shut itself down with prejudice to prevent an explosion.

So, if you go from sauteeing to pressure cooking too quickly, there are parts of the unit that may still be hotter than 250F. If the temperature probes sense this, the unit will think the pressure inside has gone too high and shut itself off as an emergency safety measure. If you don't use enough water and too quickly add the water and clamp the lid on after sauteeing, then the residual heat from the saute can boil the water off very quickly and spike either the pressure or the temperature, sending the cooker into its emergency safety mode. You could also have a fault with the cooker itself, I guess.

I've never run into this, though. After sauteeing or browning what I'm about to cook, I use the cooking liquid to deglaze the fond on the bottom and when it's all deglazed, I turn the heat off. If the cooking liquid isn't boiling with the heat off, I know everything has pretty well cooled down to a point where turning the pressure cooking function on shouldn't make the machine think it's about to explode. You shouldn't have to cool the thing completely for it to work with no issue, just cool it enough.