Good quality dried beans. Like rancho gordo
Use an unglazed clay pot, not anything like an Emile Henry
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Not interested in little green men walking among us, but not skipping coverage of UAPs, either.
I rather like that people like cooking in clay pots and ECI. But when they claim superior results, they should come prepared with facts and science. āSlow and even heatā isnāt that.
So taste isnāt a fact?
Also, how food looks affects my experience of its taste. Seeing clay cooking utensils that are beautiful to me enhances all my senses. And it reminds me of the two years I lived in Spain. And it reminds me of people I love.
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Me too, except the part about feeding guests. I think beans would be a good choice since I could freeze the experiment results.
That we taste, and perceive tastes the ways we do, is indeed a fact. But thatās about as far as anyone can go without skating on very thin ice.
We could resort to inductive reasoning, I suppose, and create truly controlled taste tests that weed out extraneous factors (e.g., where and when you eat, how hungry you are, where youāve had Dish X before, what itās served in, what portions, what the smells in the kitchen or dining areas are, temperature, seasonings, lighting, dining partners, ad nauseam).
Sure. Those are all valid reasons why you might enjoy food from clay vessels. And Iāll go you one better: the brain science around human food perception is that you may actually enjoy it more. Someone else might think rice steamed in a loved oneās dirty sweat sock or in a solid gold pan given them by the Aga Khan tastes best. But like with you, Iād challenge them to offer a āwhyā that makes culinary sense.
Fair enough. OTOH, I think I might ask, rather than āchallengeā, which was the intention of this thread.
To be fair, I didnāt do a good job with the title and purpose of this thread. It was a spin off of another one.
Hereās another pork dish that was a link in one of the other links.
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No problem. Iāve been futilely asking for sensible theories of why this may be with ECI for many years now.
So with clay, I may have already come loaded for bear.
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Lean into Madridās comment about the esthetic of cooking. Itās real to some people. Sort of like some people sense bay leaves, others just skip them.
I have a Hungarian gulasz on my stove even as I write this, itās cooking in a Turkish guvec. Sorta like bringing the austro Hungarian empire back to life!
Not sure why you care if thereās some empirical evidence to support my decision to pull out this pot today rather than the mauviel copper stew pot I put next to it on the stove for this photoshoot. The soup is delicious, my pot never hit a full boil (which would have been more difficult if I used the copper pot instead) and Iām happy with both my process and my results
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Kaleokahu, my skeptical friend,
Finished the gulasz. Really enjoyed it.
Iām making some chickpeas tonight to use during the week. As you can see from the picture, I chose to use a 2.5 liter la chamba soup pot. I could equally have opted for the fissler 2.7 liter pot, in the picture (which is a fairly premium stainless pot), but Iām convinced the clay pot helps enormously with temperature control and my experience with all these different options makes the choice a bit of a no brainer for me. You can probably pick up from the picture how low the flame is under a heat diffuser. That, as they say, is the ticket.
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ā77 years old at the time of this writing,ā
ā¦ 
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Cook in whatever you like. But blowing smoke about clay-cooked foods tasting better needs empirical proof. The same sort of unsupported claims still get made about āevenā cooking in cast iron, and thatās caused countless consumers to waste money building batteries of mediocre pieces.
Thatās why.
@kaleokahu , I am intrigued by the idea of āwasteā in this context. I know without a doubt I donāt need one more thing in my kitchen, and in fact I could use a lot less. Certainly one reason I am following this discussion is because I am wondering why I am holding on to this baker. But for me, it is not a āwasteā of money.
Maybe for me wasted space. I would almost certainly replace it with something else! Similarly, some might consider even thinking about this a waste of time, but I wouldnāt be on HO if I felt that way.
Nowā¦how about "mediocre "? 
Perhaps another idea for a thread could be about āessentialā things in a kitchen based on money or space. I hadnāt thought of clay cookers that way.
Why do you keep talking about cast iron? Iām using clay, the topic is about clay. The two materials couldnāt be more different but somehow you seem to have found an equivalency
If you wanted to simmer my gulyas below boiling, what material would you recommend? And I donāt believe I ever mentioned superior flavor, Iāve been talking about different temperature control.
No, theyāre both terrible materials in terms of conductivity and responsiveness. Clayās worse, but not by a lot.
If itās not evident by now, I mention cast iron because similar unsupported hyperbole gets applied. I could compare with pyroceram, too, but for lack of tradition and romanticism, no one seems to make hyperbolic claims about that.
Again, enjoy cooking in anything you want.
No offense meant. But thermally, cast iron is objectively that.
But (and this dovetails with your wondering over storage) I have kept some ECI around. In my case, itās mostly because I sometimes want to return to my conclusions or make different comparisons. In rare cases, itās due to shape, or because I want to work with extremely high heat or acidity. Iām lucky to have ample storage, so Iām tempted to pick up a thrift-store romertopf just to gather data for future postsāand eat well along the way.
Romertopfs are really meant as baking implements. Theyāre not designed for stovetop use. They go into ovens.
I wouldnāt want you to needlessly buy something and use it improperly. If you want to actually get something for. Stove top applications let me know, Iād be happy to offer you any assistance to get the right tool for the job.
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Much appreciated , but I donāt understand. To me mediocre just means āmerely adequateā or āof only ordinary qualityā; I donāt find that offensive, at least in the context of things Iām trying out in my kitchen.
I just happened was/is using two clayware tonight
A donabe rice cooker and the cooked rice
A Chinese rough (sand) clay pot. In the process of cooking the mushroom and the fish maw will be added later.
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I saw this Romertopf today. Its interior was unglazed. I passed on it for the moment but may buy another one if I decide to go through with this experiment. First I want to finalize the recipe, source the ingredients, decide on stove top or oven, and only then will I buy another romertopf. Buying and donating them back has immunized me from buying them again.
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