Treating the outside of pots before cooking

[eisely]

This subject was dealt with to a certain extent in another thread.

 

Painting the bottoms of your cooking pots and pans before you go out helps with heat transmission to the food or water. I have tried this and it works. Different manufacturers make heat resistant paints designed for spot painting barbecues. The stuff wears off with use and washing, but the paint does not burn.

 

Soaping the outside of pots is a good idea if you are cooking over a wood fire. If you are using only stoves for cooking, which is mandatory in many areas, then this is an unnecessary addition to your cleaning problem.

[Eman]

Good story another Scouter told me about when he was a young Scout. On the first campout they told him to soap the pot. They didn't tell him the outside of the pot! He's got a memory to last a lifetime.

[eisely]

Along the line of the previous post, one of my favorite scout stories involves cooking with my patrol at the 1957 jamboree at Valley Forge.

 

The evening meal included peas as a vegetable and butterscotch pudding as a dessert. Along with the ingredients came printed step by step instructions. Somewhere around step 4 the instructions said, "Pour peas into pot." Somewhere around step 8 the instructions said, "Pour pudding into pot." You got it. The pudding went into the peas. The boy (not me) who was cook that evening took a lot of razzing. The biggest kid in the patrol was still hungry after all the other items on the menu were consumed, and dug into the pea pudding, commenting, "This ain't too bad."