Anyone have any experience with or views on pressure cookers in the back country? Thermodynamically, they make perfect sense: huge energy savings in putting heat into temperature rather than boiling. Wonder if that is worth the weight, price?
Only if you have a big group and a mule train to haul the stuff. I haven't heard of anyone actually carrying one of these in a long time.
Freeze dried / instant meals are pretty good these days. My favorite is Mountain House. I usually dump the meal in my cup/pot, add water and heat. If I am preparing a single meal, I'll eat it as it warms, since it is so good.
the only people who will care about such a device are those who actually cook food.
I haven't carried food beyond some angel hair noodles (5 min boil) that needed the burner lit after reaching initial boil. Just about everything I eat out there gets dumped into boiling water and then I let it sit for 7-10 minutes wrapped in a fleece jacket. Done. And it doesn't always have to be freeze dried: minute rice meals, many Knorr entrees (kicked up with dried meat or real bacon bits), couscous, vegetarian taco mix, soups, etc - just shop your grocery store for the things that are done quickly.
I can't imagine doing a 6 hour bean stew up there, even if the pressure cooker can cut that time down to 1 hour - that is a lot of fuel, unless you got a real big fire going.
ACtually the idea occurred to me not for cooking but for fuel conservation. I haven't bought a prepared instant meal since 1964, and I never cook, either, except for angel hair and the odd trout. Everything else is either grocery store instant or I dry myself. Costs me a fraction of Mountain House prices, tastes even better, and I can control ingredients (We go lacto-ovarian Zone veggie in the back country) A lot of that does much better with a little extra burner time. All of it reconstitutes significantly faster at sea level boiling than at 10,000 ft boiling, but more importantly, it takes a lot less fuel to reach any temp if nothing is being vaporized along the way (yes, even a covered pot loses a lot of energy, if not volume, to vaporization). No intention of baked beans from scratch, but I'll be feeding 6 for 10 days or so and thought it would be worth at least doing the weight/fuel calculation for a pressure cooker (as it happens, exactly the model wagga posted), which btw IS 3-4 lbs, but definitely not pack-mule material.
The smaller of the GSI cookers is actually just over 2 lbs, which is 2 pint bottles of fuel, butI have a different method in my madness. The consideration for me is not the weight of the fuel vs the weight of the cooker, but the weight of the cooker vs the absolute minimization of any fuel use as a matter of principle. I might carry 2 pounds of aluminum to save a pound of fuel, especially as an experiment. Just as I might carry a couple pounds of fishing gear and happily not eat a single fish. In fact, in addition to an MSR, I will be carrying two experimental stoves: one that works sort of like but surpasses the ZZip (Sierra) Ztove, and a TLUD (Top Lit Updraft Gasifier) that costs nothing and weighs less than a No 10 can, tuna fish can and tomato paste can (because that's what it is made of) . Glad to let you know how it turns out.
Note that the Zip either smokes like crazy or flames like crazy, either way wasting most of the fuel. That's because air is blasted in from the bottom and tries to burn the entire fuel charge all at once from the bottom up. Beauty of the tlud (aside from having no moving parts) is that it burns from the top down and the fire is completely controlled by the air inlet vents and burns completely (clean) even at low heat. Since its completely hollow when disassembled, it takes almost zero cubes and can be packed full with other gear.