Let's Make Sense of Thermal Cooking Cookbook

This is one of the few cookbooks that teaches you how to use that thermal cooker you picked up on the advice of either a preparedness-minded friend, an off-road enthusiast, or an environmentalist who is into alternative sources of cooking. It is thorough in introducing you to the topic of how this technology works, what it is good, and not good for cooking, ways you can remediate the "not so good for cooking THIS particular food" issues if you still wish to enjoy them on a road trip, and then has some tasty recipes you will actually USE. The last 25% of the book takes heroic measures to use this technology to cook foods that thermal cookers aren't really best at cooking, so while those last few recipes did work and tasted good, I probably won't make those a second time (too much fiddling around), but this book is worth the fairly significant cost just to get USEFUL recipes that you can use your thermal cooker. I bought my thermal cooker essentially to reconstitute dried beans without burning through an entire bottle of propane while out on an extended family camping trip (gotta make chili for an entire Boy Scout troop! :-), but this cookbook will teach you how to actually USE that pot daily for more ordinary outings so it justifies the space in the trunk of your SUV with 4 whiney kids, a dog, and all of your camping gear. I found the "meals on the road" recipes to be most helpful ... get your rice or potatoes and stew started at breakfast, just before you brake camp, throw it into the thermal cooker, and then by the time you set up camp again 6 hours later on the road, you've got a hot, well-balanced and economical meal ready to feed everybody when they are exhausted.

"Sherman, set the time machine to 10/27/23!" Update- Tis the season for new recipes & I rediscovered this when I went looking for a new Kindle cookbook. It made me smile. I was surprised to see so many years had past. Not surprised that I'd still be sharing my love of thermal cookers. And not surprisingly, I still refer to this great little book which started it all for me. After all these years, few cookbooks exist on the subject & no other thermal cooker book even comes close. No buyer's remorse here. Investing in this book & my (first) cooker was good for my time management, good for our tummies & good for the planet. ××00××00×× Win. Win. Win. ××00××00×× Origin review... I window shopped thermal cookers for quite awhile. But I couldn't make that commitment for fear of wasting time, money & food. Then I found this book. Then I found the author's blog (cindysense). Now I own a cooker & am really enjoying myself (re)learning to cook. It's obvious the author is invested & enjoys sharing her wealth of knowledge. There is a lot to this book. I think most people can get at least something out of it. So, it's well worth buying just to read. But if you're like me & want to delve into thermal cooking, it's a marvelous little treasure trove & a must have for your cookbook collection!

Good info and recipes.

I bought this because I needed a cookbook for my thermal cooker. This book is a quality print job with lots of color photos and many recipes for kid-approved foods. I like that the pages are spiral bound (the spiral is hidden inside the book's spine) so the book will lay perfectly flat when open. There are also basic instructions for preparing many types of whole grains and dried legumes and for sterilizing drinking water so this book also would be useful to preppers with lots of buckets of storage food and limited fuel for camp cooking.

The photos are great! And it is very informative, giving clear directions on how to get started. I like the examples of how it can be used, how long the heat can be retained and what works best in the thermal cooker. It still will require some practice in using it with our own recipes, but the nice thing is you can ask someone else if they have tried doing what you want to make. I used my Saratoga Jack for the first time at Thanksgiving to store my sausage stuffing, which i just transferred from the oven. The thermal cooker kept it hot and moist, which was exactly what I needed. This book is very good but cannot spell out exactly how every recipe you come up will turn out, but it gives enough information so that you are not in the dark on how to use it.

I've had a thermal cooker for over a year and have only cooked soups and yogurt in it ever. I've had a difficult time finding recipies for other foods that I could confidently cook without wondering if it was cooked through or still warm enough. This book was written with the authors primary thermal cooker in mind. If you don't own this specific cooker, you will need to do more work in adjusting each recipe's size, temperature, cook time, and the pots and pans you use. That being said, it includes the information needed for you to do that, and it includes a variety of recipes including breads and desserts that I hadn't been able to find previously. I give it 5 stars for all the recipes and for including the formulas to adapt them for each individual thermal cooker.

Admittedly the recipes weren't what I was expecting, but the knowledge the author shares on how to cook with a thermal cooker (what works & what doesn't) makes this a valuable resource.

I pre-ordered this book and when I got it I LOVED it so much I couldn't put it down. If you like the idea of cooking with very little energy used, this book is one you have to get! It's put together beautifully, user friendly and easily understood. The recipes are fantastic. I've been to 2 classes taught by the author, Cindy Miller, and tasted the recipes she fine tuned to use with a thermal cooker and they were WONDERFUL! I love the idea of putting recipes together in jars or bags to use for future times when life is always busy. The writing in the book feels like she's next to me in the kitchen helping me cook. Very Well done Cindy!!!!

Cindy has written more than a recipe book; this is a guidebook to thermal cooking. Although in the UK we may not have access to some of the ingredients mentioned, nevertheless there were plenty of recipes that I would be interested in trying. It will be interesting to see whether I can convert the cup measurements to grams for scaling the recipes to fit my brand of cooker but at least the process is well explained!

Thermal cooking is a very useful and frugal way of cooking. This book provides so much intrinsic information. It really is a must for anyone starting out in thermal cooking.