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Throughout East Africa one finds the all-pervasive
pressed aluminum pot in markets, dukas, kiosks, supermarkets and even
offered through you car's window in traffic jams.
This flat-bottomed pot comes in a very wide range
of sizes- you can buy a set of 20 pots or more all neatly nestled
into each other ranging up from 10 cm diameter. The biggest I've seen must
be close to 1 meter in dia.
My test pot size is 21 cm. internal dia. and 10 cm
deep, made of 1mm aluminum. I has a flat1.75 cm wide rim turned
out 90 degrees to the pot wall.
The (very clean) pot comfortably holds 2 litres of
water and I test charcoal on a ceramic-lined Jiko with a of approximately the
same internal diameter as the pot's bottom. Charcoal load is 750 gm. and the
bottom of the pot is (on average) 4 cm from the fuel.
I do not place a cover on the pot. I measure the
usual parameters during a test, including time from lighting to boil and
consider the test ended when simmering (the last of the tiny bubbles detaching
from pot bottom) stops.
But........ bet I could win any time-to-boil
competition right away if I conducted it at the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro at 6,400
m. altitude!
elk
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