If We Insulate Our Houses, Why Not Our Cooking Pots? Low-tech Magazine
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Are there any non-thermal cookers available?
I only use thermal cookers that use angry gazes from people who don’t get the joke when their food is cold
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From the Amazon Q&A section
You can`t carry around and gettling tilted over because its not designed for travel.
I should have expected that this was a thing.
As a youngish adult was thoroughly with my father improvising something like this to cook a turkey. For complicated reasons, my parents volunteered to bring the turkey to a family Thanksgiving three hours’ drive away. My dad’s not much interested in cooking, but looked at the project as a physics problem. He concluded that, if you got enough heat into the outer bits and then put it in a sufficiently insulated box, the temperature would equilibrate during the drive. It was actually one of the better cooked turkeys I’ve eaten.
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Seems another useless gadget. I also don’t get the assertion that it is “great for camping”. Why? Is there something about the food you eat when camping that requires a delay between cooking and eating, or that requires slow cooking? I just don’t get it.
Neat!
I move a lot of food around when visiting family. Be nice to see how this works.
Want to get the sous vide setup and wonder if this would be a good vessel for that too?
Thanks
For some stupid inexplicable reason I thought “thermal cooker” mean “solar cooker” – and none of this made a bit of sense. After googling it all, I see that a “thermal cooker” is basically the generic name for “really good Thermos” – such that the food will keep “cooking” because of all the insulation – basically the food can’t get cold and if it can’t get cold that means it’s still cooking.
Car camping I could see – backpacking not so much really, unless the cooker itself is lightweight (unlikely). It’d be need to start your chill at home … through it in this thing. And then when you get to where you’re going just open this thing up and eat your chili all nice and hot. Certainly not something that is needed but I can see the appeal.
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Leaving dinner to cook unattended while you do other things? Coming back from a day doing stuff to sit down to a hot meal without any further fucking about or waiting a couple hours for a really good stew?
Not my idea of camping food, TBH, way too heavy and bulky (I used to do the ultra-light tramping thing back in better days) but if you’re setting up a base-camp, I can really see the attraction.
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So many fascinating failure modes…
Possibly useful for car camping, but as someone who has for many years has backpacked with a single titanium pot and extremely lightweight stoves, this seems a little far removed from practicality. The technique of saving fuel by using a “cosy” to cover the pot after boiling while the food finishes is pretty standard lightweight backpacking technique. Also, If one is cold and hungry after a day on the trail, real slow cooking is the last thing that one want!.
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It’s a good job that’s not the intended use for it, then. 
It’s like those cast-iron dutch-ovens. Brilliant for making a roast in the embers with damper bread, but you’d need to be some sort of masochist to tote it with you if you’re planning on making any distance.
OTOH, if you’re set up in the one spot for some fishing or hunting, perfect.
Coming back to base to find a ready-cooked hot meal at the end of the day is a treat though. And as it says in the OP,
an awesome way to set a meal cooking at the campsite, while I go off and have an adventure.
So, yeah, if they were hiking the NW loop of Stewart Island, size and weight it would be an issue. They aren’t. It’s not.
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Or so said the bears who swung by my camp an hour before I got back.
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Leaving food cooking/staying warm and unattended wouldn’t be good idea in BC where I live.
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Hey, I’ve hiked that loop! It puts the so-called “mud” we have here in the PNW into perspective. A great adventure. I saw a kiwi (the feathered kind).
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The best way to have a really good stew when camping is to cook it at home before you go, and just reheat when you want to eat it, surely? The ritual of cooking on a small camp-stove is part of what I love about hiking. The planning to maximise conservation fuel and water, yet still be able to have a satisfying meal is fun. Coffee made with the hot water in which you boiled the pasta? Yeah!
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I have used a Thermos-branded one for a number of years. I purchased it from a site in Canada, but the packaging and documentation were Japanese. I use it primarily for camping meals in my VW Westy; I cook it on the stove, eat a portion, and put the rest in the cooker for later. I have had meals that were still pleasantly warm up to 17 hours in the cooker. Another use is potlucks; I use it just about every time. I often get questions about it.
I was surprised to learn they do not sell well in the states, until I realized that we can get a cheap slow cooker for $30 at any department store, and generally have access to reliable electricity everywhere.
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As much as calling something that does no sort of cooking a “cooker” seems weird, I have realized that the more common names for insulated boxes (c.f. “cooler”, “icebox”, “ice chest”, &etc.) are just as absurd.
I use a “cooler” as a “thermal cooker” quite frequently. But not for anything I’d call camping. Is it camping if your van is called a camper? What if it’s just a stepvan that you live in all the time, is that still camping, or is that the upper crust of poverty? It’s all too confusing for me.
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