Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Backpack Hunting mess kit--stainless steel or aluminum?

For boat & vehicle travel, stainless is a no brainer: bombproof tough, relatively low cost, relatively easy to clean. Go with Ti if you are going to carry it with human power, and buy it instead of stainless if you find it on sale. FWIW I wouldn't even consider aluminum.

Went to stainless steel in 70's, to Ti in early 90's and strongly dislike aluminum. Don't like the taste of it that sometimes transfers to food either! For roughly cleaned outdoor use, hard finish coatings on aluminum won't last long.

added: merely adding one codger's agreement to the consensus.

Price is a bit disconcerting... But the stuff weighs practically nothing
I use a Ti MSR pot and a stainless fry pan my whole kit alcohol stove/ homemade wood stove/ pot/cup/frypan/spork/2 lighters/ windscreen weighs on my digital scale 21oz. If I ditch the SS fry pan I can be just under a pound and That is with no fuel. I want to find the powdered alcohol!

Titanium is fine for boiling water, but I wouldn't try to cook real food in it. It's very thin and doesn't distribute heat very well, stuff burns very easily in it.

Travis--that is the best way of cooking fish I have ever seen!

It may not look like much, but it taste damn good that night.



Travis

I don't doubt that at all. Throw some wild asparagus, morels and maybe a strip of some venison backstraps on there and that would be hard to beat anywhere!

For backpacking If I am just boiling water, I use titanium. If I actually want to cook, I use hard coat anodized aluminum and for frying prefer a light weight carbon steel pan that is well seasoned.

Hard anodized aluminum is amazingly durable. I use metal spatula for scraping the pan clean. I have a couple GSI hard anodized pans that one or the other gets used at home nearly every day and has been that way for 7-8 years.

Coatings like Teflon or non stick silicon coatings, come off pretty easily in my experience.

I don't care much for stainless steel for cooking and if I had pack stock, I'd carry cast iron.

They must be making that anodized coating stronger. I believe you, Ed, and I admit that I haven't used aluminum in so long that my data is dated. 'Course I often use sand to scrub camping pots. True enough that IME stainless and Ti both tend to burn and stick food in hot spots.

There is this Scotch Brite sponge stuff that weighs almost nothing, cleans well and has been found to be slightly less abrasive on cookware than sand, pea gravel or granite blocks.

Not knocking Ti for the UL crowd or SS for the hale and hearty or motorized, but there must be a couple of different versions of aluminum in the conversation that are very different. From many of the comments, I'm picturing a circa 1972 K-Mart brand aluminum mess kit that must be generating the ill will. I had one of those as a kid and used it as a toy. It certainly didn't look good enough to eat out of.

Most premium kitchen cookware is aluminum for a reason. Even the high end stainless, like my wife's All Clad, is a mix on the bottom to ensure even heating.

For folks interest in stainless steel pots, I can recommend the MSR Stowaway range. Not the lightest, but very good quality, with an excellent lid that locks in place for transport/storage.

Must be one of those new high tech items I haven't caught up with yet!

Funnily enough I prefer Titanium to Aluminium for cooking.

I find that while the Aluminium conducts heat well it does not HOLD heat well. On the other hand Titanium does not conduct heat well but does hold it well.

I use a woodstove a lot and tend to rotate pots off and on the stove. I have observed that aluminium pots once off of the stove lose their heat quickly while Titanium holds heat. I once did a one on one contest between the 2 on a 2 burner Coleman stove and the Aluminium pot boiled water far more quickly but needed to be put back on the burner frequently to maintain heat. Meanwhile while slower to boil the titanium pot could be taken off of the stove and set aside. It would hold enough heat to cook the rice , pasta etc even if set on snow or cold, cold ground.

Anyway, if your concern is not just about fast boil time then Titanium is a good option.

Patrick