by rucksack » Wed 05 May, 2010 9:10 am
The concern about cooking in aluminium arose from some very flawed research in the late 1980s (I think). Trangia's response (as walkers everywhere were preparing to jettison their Trangia aluminium cookware), was to release stainless steel versions of their 25 and 27 Storm cookers where the pans and frypan were stainless steel, but the windshield and kettles remained aluminium . The flawed research was soon shown to be, well, seriously flawed. As anyone who has tried cooking with stainless steel pans and frypans will know, stainless steel is a very poor conductor, so burnt offerings are very often the order of the day. Trangia subsequently replaced their stainless steel pans and frypans with 'Duossal', which put the aluminium back on the 'outside' where it would spread the heat, but left the stainless steel on the 'inside' where it is easy to clean, etc. As the previous correspondents have noted, more recent advances in aluminium cookware have made the 1990s foray into stainless steel quite obsolete.