This is simply not the reality. Fiberglass has its weakness namely its structural weakness. It defuses heat as well or better than any metal defuser I have tried so far but I have more to try.
People have been using fire to cook food with for a pretty long time and I am pretty sure during the millennia before Revere Ware and All-Clad folks didn’t burn their food everyday. This insight jumped out at me as I was doing some testing of my camp cookware on my kitchen range.
I read
Michael Chu’s article posted by Burton. For a layperson it was thermal engineering at a level I can more or less grasp – it is very well written. Chu describes the hot and cold area in gas burner and electric resistance coil ranges of the last part of the twentieth century. I however was doing my tests on a
GLASS top range, which has very even heat distribution and heat modulation. Then I though back to the gas range my mother cooked on with its double flame rings on each burner opposed to the single flame ring on Chu’s example. I realized the clad and lined and plied pans we have been discussing were in answer to the specific deficiencies of twentieth century cooking technology. I remember cooking on a wood stove with its concentric removable burner rings that ensured even heating regardless of the pans diameter. Dutch ovens stacked with coals, Hawaiian gourds were used to boil taro with red hot lava rock tossed in, the cannibal caldrons complete with explorers ready to be boiled in so many
cartoons all seemed to have solved the problem of even heat distribution. As near as I can tell everyone from paleolithic times until the second half of the twentieth century had heating harmony between flame and pot.
Nowhere is disharmony between pan and stove more pronounced than the backpacking ultra-light stove and pot. To test my vision I cooked an egg omelet in my 15/1000” thick titanium fry pan sitting on a half inch high pot stand over a glass top burner. If my insight was correct, it should cook as evenly as my well-seasoned enameled Calphalon cast iron skillet. The results, near perfection, where I was used to having a black charred middle and runny raw edges.
Then for the real test of truth, I cut out a scrap on fiberglass cloth and draped it over my alcohol stove and repeated the process in the ti pan again. Not quite perfection. I got a little charring on one edge but the omelet was cooked through from edge to edge. The design needs some improvement and fiberglass is not durable enough for camping but the concept is valid. The potential rewards: the weight of titanium, the durability and forgiveness of stainless, the heat distribution of aluminum, the non-reactive properties of Pyrex and the cooking prowess of cast iron. (Now is that too much to hope for?) So for me the conversation is no longer about the pot but about the stove.
Recipe: 1 local, farm fresh, organic, pasture fed egg, a splash of rice milk, hefty pinch of basil, and 3 or 4 dashes of Cholula sauce cooked in extra virgin olive oil (EVO).