Alternative Cooking – Thermal Cooker

Do you use a thermal cooker? Are you familiar with them?

This is more of a convenience item and probably not something I would place at the top of my prepping supply list, simply because the food has to be heated to boiling before being placed in the cooker, and only certain foods lend themselves to being cooked in the thermal cooker. It is a great cooker and I love mine but I’m not sure how much I would use it if we had no power. It would be great if there was intermittent power and you could take advantage of bringing food to a full boil while you have power and then letting the thermal cooker do the rest of the cooking, and it would be great in a community situation where there might be a fire built and several families trying to cook their meal on that fire. Your thermal cooker could be brought to a boil, then you could take it and get out of everyone else’s way.

I had resisted because I was concerned about the safety . . what if foods sit too long and get too cool? That’s dangerous. I was recently talking to a friend who is a home extension lady and she is going to write a guest post about thermal cookers when she has time, but she assured me that they are safe so long as you don’t leave the food in them too long.  That’s all I needed to hear. There are several brands available but because we love the Zojirushi appliances that we already have, I ordered this one. I got the smaller one, the 1-1/2 gallon size. It’s best to fill them almost completely full and 1-1/2 gallons is more than we usually need.

I have used it only a very few times but for the items that it’s good for, it’s great!  I recently used it for soup that needed to simmer for a couple of hours.

While I didn’t do the browning in the insert, as soon as all the ingredients were combined, I poured them into the insert, brought it to a full boil and then placed the insert inside the cooker.

The temp of the ingredients at this point, when I remembered to take a picture, was a little past 190º.

The cooker was closed and left alone, sitting on the counter, using no energy at all, for about 4-1/2 hours.

When opened, the temp was about 170º, plenty warm enough to be served.

I’m real happy with this cooker.  It seems a bit wasteful to have something simmering on the stove for hours when something like this thermal cooker will do pretty much the same thing without using power.  Some have compared it to a slow cooker that uses no power but it isn’t really the same in that the slow cooker will maintain heat as long as you have it turned on. With the thermal cooker, though it keeps things hot for a good while, the temp does steadily drop. I have read that it drops about 5 degrees per hour and that’s exactly what I experienced in the example above. In about 4-1/2 hours, the temp dropped 20 degrees.

I make sure the temp never drops below 145º. I cooked pinto beans in the thermal cooker and after about 3 hours, I removed the insert, re-heated the beans to boiling and then replaced it in the thermal cooker.

The thermal cooker would be great for taking food on short trips when you want it to be done when you arrive, or when trying to conserve energy and all it takes is bringing the food to a boil and then letting it finish cooking without the use of power.

So far, I’ve made chili, soup, spaghetti sauce . . anything that benefits from a long, slow simmer, and isn’t “dry”, would be a good candidate for thermal cooking. I don’t think roasting a chicken or baking a potato would work . . it needs liquid to operate properly.

I don’t see the thermal cooker taking the place of the slow cooker or the pressure cooker or any of those other specialty cookers, but it is nice to have and as I said above, I don’t see it being the most useful took during a power outage, but I can see it having its place.

For the linkup or in your comments, please write about any ideas you have regarding the thermal cooker, or ideas you came up while cooking your dinner tonight, as to what you would do if you were preparing this same meal and trying to do without power.