A friend of ours picked up a thermal pot for us when a visited a shop in North Carolina. What the heck is a thermal pot, you ask? Well, it is sort of like a slow cooker, but it does not use any electricity.

It has an inner pot that you seal off, inside an outer shell, and it is really efficient at retaining heat. Liquids will remain steaming hot for hours inside the thermal pot, and foods basically self cooks. The steam and convection circulate inside the pot and food continues to cook.

The Chinese use this to cook a lot of soups and stews. Any meats, such as roasts and chicken will come out really tender because of the slow cooking process. The key is the cube the meat and cover it with liquid. A whole roast will fit in the pot, but I think it would not cook fully unless it was chopped into smaller pieces. Also, you do not want to leave it in the pot for too long since the meat will just fall apart when it is done.


There is no need for electricity with this pot, except only when initially bringing the inner pot to a boil. After the food in the inner pot is boiling, you remove it from the stove and place it in the outer pot and seal it off. This is nice for us since I do not like to leave things on when we leave the house.

We gave the pot a test drive the other by making some pork short ribs, Taiwanese _style_, and it came out really good. We figure that we will also be able to use this for potlucks as a food warmer. Food stays warm for hours in this gadget.

These happen to also be available on the web. I saw it on Amazon.com here