Titanium pots conduct heat very rapidly, hence why there are hotspots and burning in the pot.
Wikipedia disagrees:
"Titanium is fairly hard, non-magnetic and a poor conductor of heat and electricity."
The hotspots occur as the heat becomes concentrated on small spots, rather than conducting along the pot. If you were to take a narrow blue flame, and apply it to one corner of a titanium pot, whilst holding the rim, you'll find that you can get the pot very hot before your fingers get too warm to hold the pot. With aluminium and steel the opposite is the case. Of the three materials, Ali conducts best, followed by steel then Titanium.
If it conducted heat so well I thought there wouldn't be hotspots?
Yep, that's basically it.
I recently ordered these:
They look like the fire maple ones that Alpik sell. Since they were £15 they helped off-set the delivery costs of some other items.
Hope they don't suck.
I've got on well with mine. I tend to leave the big pot + lid at home, and just use the little pot. Was ideal this weekend for boiling up the spuds to go with dinner. I was using it with my meths stove.
Titanium pots are so thin, the heat goes straight through.
Al and steel will give you a better heat spread, true.
People focus too much on fast boil times, for most real life scenarios you need a low heat and a large pot.
Large pot less so, more a thick bottomed pot. This is why a lot of recipe books will describe "heavy bottomed pan". It provides better heat conduction than the thin ones. It's also important to make sure you match the pan to the amount of food. You want to transfer the heat from the flame to the pan and into the food as efficiently as possible. Frying is, in that case, a less than ideal use case.
For the use case that many of us have, warming stuff up on a little camp stove, most pots aren't too thin, tho there is an argument for the base of most pots being slightly thicker. If you just want to boil water to rehydrate dinner, then titanium is fine. It all depends what you're trying to do as to which pot you want to take. Ultimately it's not practical to lug a le cruset pot up a mountain...
J
