Sorry but you don't need cast iron to cook real 'meals' on the road...nor at home. Thin metal pans require some refinement in your technique but not all that much. I cook many of the same recipes on the road that I cook at home. I do so because I have the recipes memorized. Camp cooksets and camp stoves can do a whole lot better than just boiling water but you do have to learn how to use them.

Cool! Sounds like a great way to travel!

Cast iron is certainly not the only way to cook well, but I do find my cast iron pan the most enjoyable to use, and for some things I find that it makes a big difference. I'll look into the spun steel, next time I buy a frying pan, though.

The toughest challenge for me was to find some sizes small enough for solo cycle camping- and it ended up at some unconventional selections. Check out this brie baker - its TINY - but that's a GOOD thing! https://www.tweedandhickory.com/shops...u-village.html
And then there's this cast iron chocolate fondue thing https://shopping.aol.com/1400406-mini...78/pg756849367

You can get cast iron pots in 10, 12 and 14cm sizes, useful for the solo camper (if a little heavy)
What did old timer pioneers or cowboys cook with (assuming no chuck wagon full of Dutch ovens etc).
I always wondered how those nice coffee pots fitted inside their small saddle bags.

Mongol horsemen seemed to have carried a small cast iron pot to cook up sheep fat and sheep meat in the embers.

Yes

Yeah, but if you have a good alcohol stove, this isn't a problem at all.

I'm sorry, but this just isn't the case, alcohol has a set amount of energy per gram. If the same amount of fuel were used to heat an aluminum skillet and a cast iron one, the cast iron one would only be a fraction of the temperature of the aluminum one. Quite honestly though, the thermal mass of a cast iron skillet, the very thing that makes it great to cook with, is also the thing that makes it difficult to use on a camping stove with limited fuel.

I'm actually not even sold on cast iron for home use. It's heavy and awkward on a stove, and not as non-stick as non-stick. A good clad skillet has a better thermal mass (Cast iron per gram is fairly low, it's only in sheer mass that makes it so good), and a good teflon coating is better than even the cast iron skillet you inherited from your grandmother (at least in my experience), and you can cook acidic foods without worry.

You're supposed to be heating the FOOD, not the pan - so the fuel requirements are determined by that. If it actually required more fuel - I wouldn't bother with it myself. There's also ceramic coated cast iron on the market - has been for 30 years. Thats what I use when I take cast iron. It also has the advantage of being easier to use if you decide to cook over coals.

There seems to be some doubt for some reason as to the ability of an alcohol stove to get very hot. As a reference, stainless steel needs a temperature between 260 and 316 degrees Celsius to turn blue. The bottoms of all the SS pans I use with an alcohol stove are all slightly blued - even though there was liquid inside acting as a heat sink. Thats an indication of the surface temperature of the outside of the pot - (inspite of being cooled by the contents inside) the actual flame is obviously a lot hotter than that. Water boils at 100 degrees Celcius and that's usually all I use thin walled pots and pans for - boiling water. Even with a supossedly low output alcohol stove they burn food too easily.

See below.

All fuels have a set amount of energy per gram. It's all tied to the number of carbon to carbon and carbon to hydrogen bonds in the molecule and the energy released when those bonds are broken and new bonds with oxygen formed. If the fuel already has oxygen bonds, like alcohols do, the amount of heat that can be released in these chemical reactions is greatly reduced. Most hydrocarbons...molecules having only carbon and hydrogen bonds...have close to the same energy content. But once you start putting oxygen atoms on the fuel like alcohols, the amount of energy drops significantly. Ethanol and methanol have a 40% and 60% reduction, respectively, in energy over isobutane. If the alcohol fuel contains water...a distinct possibility with ethanol...the drop in energy is even higher because you have to heat the water in the fuel while burning it.

It gets even worse, because you don't get all of the heat out of the fuel that you burn...not even close. The heat goes into heating the pan...which can be a lot of you are trying to heat a 5 pound chunk of metal...the air around the pan, the food in the pan, etc. While it is true that a large cast iron skillet will hold heat, you have to get the heat into it first. And even then it's not going to hold it there for long. It will hold it longer than a thin metal pan but by the time you've heated the cast iron, you'd be a long ways towards actually cooking the food in the thinner pans with less thermal mass and that's the point isn't it? To cook the food and not waste fuel on heating metal?

And, finally, there is thermal conductivity to consider. Thermal conductivity is the ability of a material to conduct heat through the material. Using the link that Carbonfiberboy posted, you can see that the thermal conductivity of aluminum compared to cast iron is about 3 times higher. That means that heat passes through the aluminum at a higher rate than through the cast iron. Cast iron is somewhat insulated compared to aluminum. If you are passing 3 times the energy through the metal, that means that you are utilizing the fuel you carried around all day in a more efficient manner. To use a car analogy, cast iron is an SUV while aluminum is a Volkwagen TDI

The ones in the movies got theirs from the prop truck. Never confuse what you see from Hollywood and their tales of the mythic "West" with real life.

Real cowboys used enamel wear...thin steel pots and pans covered with enamel to keep them from rusting. They also ate foods that didn't require a lot of cooking like hard tack and jerky.

I fried some eggs in a pan this moring. The eggs didn't start cooking until the pan heated up. Did I do something wrong? Was there a way I could have cooked the eggs in the pan without some of the energy from the burning natural gas going towards heating the pan? I am always looking for ways to cut my utility costs.

I'm using some cast iron from the early 1900s and it's still non-stick. I don't think any teflon coated pan will be around in a hundred years and still be non-stick if it's used like I use cast iron. I can fry eggs without having them stick in my cast. Coatings will wear off over time. I like to be able to use stainless steel utensils when I cook too so cast iron has that going for it too. Even if I get stuff to burn to the pan a good seasoning layer can withstand scrubbing. Cast iron has a lot to offer cooks but it does require some love and care. I have to wipe my pans with oil and store them in the oven to keep them going but it didn't take long to get nice seasoning. I cook tomato sauce and other acidic food in my cast iron without worry... worse that can happen is some extra iron in the food.

50$ spent on thrift store cast iron is a way better value over the long term for me than buying new teflon pans every few years. I used to cook at a restaurant and we'd trash teflon pans in about six months and they were pretty decent quality pans. Even in home use I found pans never lasted... granted I wasn't spending hundreds of dollars on cookware but I know that it won't get me anything better than the cast iron. I know cast iron isn't invincible but it's pretty hard to ruin. Personally I'm okay with most people not using it, it keeps prices on nice pieces reasonable for us aficionados.

One of the things that I love about Bike Forums is that it makes me go back and think about things I learned in college that I haven't had a need for in a long time. This is one of those things. I'll apologize in advance if you already know this stuff but here goes.

In post 21, I talked about the heat requirements for heating various metals. The data for those calculations were taken from the Engineering Toolbox website. Using that information, it's possible to tell a tale of why cast iron isn't all that good for cooking and why titanium is abominable. The specific heat of aluminum, i.e. the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of the metal, is actually higher than cast iron, steel or titanium. If you had the same mass of material, it would take more heat to raise the temperature of the aluminum than it would the cast iron by a factor of almost 2. Titanium has a specific heat that is almost the same as cast iron. To think of it another way, if you could make cast iron pans as light as aluminum, it would take less heat to raise their temperature from room temperature to cooking temperature. Energy-wise, the advantage goes to cast iron, although getting cast iron as light as aluminum would be next to impossible

The interesting bit, however, is when you figure in the thermal conductivity (provided by Carbonfiberboy). As I said above, aluminum has a thermal conductivity that is twice that of cast iron. This means that heat applied to the metal moves through the metal to the food you are cooking much more quickly. Because the heat doesn't go through the cast iron as quickly, heat used to raise the temperature of the metal doesn't cook food but instead is dissipated back into the environment. In essence, the cast iron pan acts like insulation and, by radiating the heat away from the food, keeps the food in the pan from cooking as quickly when compared to aluminum.

The really interesting bit is that titanium's thermal conductivity is 2 to 4 times less than that of cast iron and around 10 times less than that of aluminum. You really have to heat the bejeebers out of titanium to get any heat through.

So the take away is that titanium is horribly expensive and doesn't work all that well. Cast iron is heavy and doesn't work all that well. Stick with aluminum...at home and on the road.

Go with aluminum. As I said above, it does take more to heat it if the mass is the same (it usually isn't) and the heat goes through the metal faster rather than just heating the outside.

The fact that they require more fuel isn't an especially big deal for most bike touring since you can still carry the same amount of fuel and just restock more frequently. That said I can't imagine carrying the extra weight of cast iron on tour.

Picked up a used Trangia , kept burner and windscreen . Threw alloy pots away . Thrft store Revere ware pot SS with copper bottom , cut off handle . I timed my boiling times , the Revere was faster , and by using a silicon bowl , weight is close . I carry a small SS Wok 12in. sometimes works on the Trangia . Couscous is my fave for a one pot meal .

When I did boil tests comparing similar size aluminum (Trangia) and titanium (Snow Peak) pots there was a >15% difference favoring aluminum. That is certainly significant but not an overwhelming difference, especially for most bike touring where fuel is readily available, but pots have to be carried up every grade, everyday.

The main challenge I find with titanium is it doesn’t disperse the heat evenly so there are “hot and cold” spots. At the extreme, this means part of your omelet is charcoal and part is still raw and runny. Mostly it means I need to stir my food frequently while cooking. My fix is to disperse the flame by changing the pot height over my alcohol stove or putting a heat disperser under the pot, e.g. a square of fiberglass fabric. I notice that the Snow Peak recognizes the titanium problem and their LiteMax canister stove sends the flame out sideways to spread the heat across the bottom of the pot.

Has anyone used hard anodized aluminum cookware? I notice a number of outdoor companies are marketing hard anodized aluminum cookware, which claim little or no aluminum contact or reaction with food. I have not tried them, but it seems like they might be as close as you can get to cast iron cooking at a backpacking weight.

Aluminum is a reactive metal. Any of it that is exposed to air instantaneously oxidizes which is what anodization does. The anodized layer is only a couple of atom thick and is easily damage which exposes fresh aluminum which oxidizes ad infinitum. "Hard" anodization just makes the layer thicker. The anodized layer is also very hard...a 9 on the Mohs scale...so it resists scratches. All of the backpacking cook kits that I've seen have a color to them...usually black...which means that they have been anodized. The only problem is that the pans are still thin which means that you have to adjust your cooking technique to match the pans.

Still beats titanium for heat conductivity and beats cast iron for weight and heat conductivity.

I think part of the problem with titanium and uneven heating is the thickness of the titanium pan itself. While the thermal conductivity of titanium is also very low, the thin bottoms of most titanium pots only exacerbate the problems. Of course nobody would pay for a centimeter thick titanium frying pan, even if you could cook wonderfully on it.

I'll agree that teflon based non-stick is less durable than cast iron, it's also more expensive. I'm (personally) happy to replace a skillet every five years or so rather than deal with trying to cope with a cast iron frying pan.

Of course, non-stick cookware should only be one tool of many in a cooks arsenal, I do also have a good supply of enameled cast iron (which, while gorgeous to look at, isn't terribly non-stick), and Stainless steel clad aluminum (which really does offer the best compromise in terms of the heat capacity of aluminum and reactivity of stainless steel). A few disposable teflon pans for delicate tasks like frying eggs are not amiss in a well stocked kitchen.

Of course, none of that is really applicable to camping, I just stick with a thin aluminum pot and accept that I'm not going to be eating the most gourmet meals on my one burner camping stove.

This is my take on it. Most of my "non stick" pans make it about 5ish years before needing to be replaced and I am very careful with how I cook in them and clean them. My cast iron will be better in 50 years than it is today assuming it is properly cared for (which is very simple btw).

How I would make the decision about bringing it on the tour is ask yourself, "will this make my experience better?" If you love your cast iron, especially if it has some sentimental value than by all means bring it. If you just want to be able to prepare decent meals on the road and don't care what the tool is as long as it does an OK job than leave it at home.

Do what you want. Personally I heat the pan first, and during the short time that's going on - crack the eggs in a cocktail shaker, cut the chives and then pour the eggs in the pan. At that point I can turn OFF the heat - the heat in the pan is more than enough to finish an omelet. Works for cast iron or SS - at least in the quality I bought.

I've owned cast aluminum pots (which are the next best thing to cast iron), spun aluminum pots, titanium and stainless steel. I don't bring what I use cause there's no choice. I bring what works for me. If someone else has another preference - that's a personal choice. As just about anything else - its the person using the equipment that makes the difference. And personally I'd much rather travel with someone that knows how to use what they've got, rather than someone thats just lugging around a bunch of ultralight equipment in the belief that expertise is somehow included with the equipment.

Actually, when I'm touring out of the country or even in a different part of the US, one of the things I like to do is to sample the local cuisine. While I do cook on tour, using titanium or aluminum pots, they are usually simple meals that don't require anything special. Carrying a pan that weighs about 15% of my kit weight is not something I would do. I don't eat much fried food as a matter of course, and do not take a frying pan made from any type of material on tour. However, sometimes I'll take 2 pots.

Different strokes for different folks

That's it folks-stove, pot and windscreen.

This thread started off simply enough. It was an honest question from someone who liked cooking with cast iron and wanted to know if it was feasible to bring cast iron bike touring.

The simple answer is - YES, its feasible - lots of people do it.

For those posters that insist at scoffing at what they feel is unjustified weight and possible extra fuel requirements - here are a few other numbers for you. Fully loaded with four overly heavy Arkel panniers and a cast iron pan - my luggage has never exceeded 35 lbs. Thats about 20 lbs less that what some posters have stated they have packed. And my body weight is only 155lbs - which is a good 45lbs less than many posters on this forum. So compared to that 60+ lb difference - a 2lb pan seems pretty light to me - and really not worth all this fuss.

??? A 2lb cast iron pan seems pretty unlikely to me.

Talk about "fuss"! You have 8 posts in this thread. That's more posts than any other person!

There was useful information in the "fussing" you are weirdly complaining about.