Douglas Grant Blog Post
Heat diffusers / flame tamers are a great idea for use with those wafer-thin backpacking pots, which love to burn your food with high-output backpacking stoves. Not only does the scorched carbon make your meal taste bad, it is awfully hard to scrape out of your stainless steel backpacking pot. This product is reasonably light, and back country chefs love them.
Note the Amazon review, good cooks are passionate advocates of this simple kitchen tool:
| "By | One Tree in the Forest (Del Rio, Tennessee, USA) |
It is very, very, very rare for me to cook without a diffuser--and often if I'm using all 4 burners I am also using 4 diffusers. I would very, very highly recommend that anyone with open flame gas burners get diffusers. I do have "non-stick" sauté pans, but all of my other cookware is Revere Stainless with heavy aluminum cooking plates on the pan bottoms. Without the use of diffusers I am certain that I would be endlessly trying to get burned-on food out of pans. I don't care how attentive a cook you are; it is often impossible to get a low enough flame to cook food without scorching it into the bottom of pans. Sometimes I even use 2 diffusers at the same time on one burner. I do have 3 double-boilers (various sizes) that I purchased when I was unable to find diffusers. Using DB's really slows down the cooking process. Using a diffuser instead of a double-boiler is much, much faster and has only a very slight possibility of scorching food (whereas it is impossible to scorch food with a double-boiler). In the summer-time I utilize electric pans as much as possible. BUT in the winter I use diffusers, welcoming the extra burner heat that keeps the furnace from cycling as often"
In the 80's I bought the first new range I ever had--a pilotless GE. I had often wished I could find diffusers because I like to cook a lot of things very slowly. (Eventually a client of mine was actually marketing a housewares line that included diffusers with the pan area identical to these from Norpro, but that had a stiff folding wire handle--which I very much like for space-saving storage and because I did not have to worry about scorching the wooden handle.)
