How to bake without an oven
Most Indian kitchens have no oven, and most baking writing quietly assumes one. The result is that a whole category of cooking gets treated as unavailable when a good part of it simply needs a different vessel.
Some things genuinely need an oven. Plenty do not, and the cooker versions are not sad compromises; they are how these were made for decades.
The pressure cooker as an oven
A pressure cooker becomes an oven when you remove what makes it a pressure cooker. Take the gasket out and take the whistle off. Leave them on and you are steaming, and the cake will be wet and dense.
Put two cups of salt or clean sand in the base and stand a trivet on it. The salt spreads the heat so the base does not scorch while the middle is still raw, and it can be reused indefinitely.
Preheat the empty cooker on medium for ten minutes, then put the tin in, lid on, lowest possible flame. A standard cake takes 35 to 40 minutes. Do not open it before thirty.
- Gasket out, whistle off, every time
- Salt or sand in the base, never a dry empty cooker
- Lowest flame, and preheat first
- Judge by a skewer, not by the clock
What works and what does not
Cakes, brownies and anything with a batter work well. The heat is gentle and even, which suits them.
Bread mostly does not. Bread needs a burst of high dry heat to spring and to form a crust, and a cooker gives neither. Flatbreads on a tawa are the answer instead, and they are not a substitute so much as a different and equally good thing.
Cookies do not work. They need dry radiant heat from above and below, and in a cooker they steam into soft discs.
The things that need no heat at all
A surprising amount of what people want from baking is achievable with a fridge and twenty minutes.
Biscuit-base cheesecakes set on cream and acid rather than eggs and heat. Chocolate truffles are chocolate and cream. Granola bars press together and chill. Biscuit cake is melted chocolate holding broken biscuits.
These are not lesser versions of baked things. They are their own category and several of them are easier to get right than a cake.
Tawa and pan baking
A heavy tawa with a lid is a workable oven for anything flat. Pizza on a tawa with the lid on for eight minutes melts cheese properly, because the lid traps heat above the food rather than letting it escape.
The same trick works for garlic bread, for toasties and for reheating anything you want crisp on one side and warm through.
The rule is always low heat plus a lid. High heat plus a lid steams; low heat plus a lid bakes.
If you do buy something
An OTG, or oven-toaster-grill, is the sensible first purchase and costs a fraction of a built-in oven. It does everything in this section better and adds cookies, bread and roasting.
A microwave with a convection mode is the second option and is genuinely capable, though the learning curve is steeper because the timings differ from every recipe you will read.
Neither is necessary. The eleven no-oven bakes here are written for the cooker and the pan from the start, not adapted down from an oven version.