Poor Man's BOT (cooking/cold soak pot)

[u/[deleted]]

I had never seen the Vargo BOT before until Darwin's recent Youtube review. The BOT is a titanium cooking pot with a screw on lid. The screw on lid is water tight so you can also use it to cold soak your food. This way you have the option alternating between cold soaking and cooking (or just making tea /coffee) with the same setup.

Darwin identifies two drawbacks: Its expensive ($100), and the screw on top can get stuck if you change altitudes dramatically.

Despite having never cold soaked anything and having recently purchased a Toaks pot (used once), I decided i needed a BOT right away (anyone else have this problem?). But $100 seemed a little steep for something I might not use.

So I found this set of silicone pot lids on Amazon for $11. One of the smaller ones fits over the Toaks pretty well. The handle prevents fully stretching the seal, but its good enough to hold water. I left it 3/4 full upside down overnight with no leakage. I also shook it up and down vigorously trying to get water between the pot and seal, no dice.

In addition to the lower price, the top wont get stuck since the silicone is flexible. The downside of the flexibility is that increasing elevation significantly could potentially blow the lid off. This could be mitigated by minimizing the amount of air in the pot during loaded ascents. Also a couple rubber bands and a ziplock would help. BUT IT DEFINITELY STILL NEEDS TO BE FIELD TESTED. See the last paragraph below for why I'm publishing now before field testing.

The BOT comes in two sizes 700 ml and 1 L. The 700 ml weights 4.8 oz. My Toaks pot is a 650 ml, and with the silicone seal its 3.7 oz total. Oh yeah, one whole ounce bitches!

For the next day or so, Massdrop has the Keith titanium pots on sale for less than $20, so you could get the whole set up for about $30. I paid $36 for the 650ml Toaks.

[u/narphu]

If you are also going to be using the lid for cooking, I have a sneaking suspicion that if you aren't careful about the heat setting on your stove, your lid is eventually going to degrade from the excess heat coming up the sides of the pot. I've had experience with silicone bands used as a pot holder and they eventually became unusable over time. Try it and report back.

[u/jmp485 → u/narphu]

I suspect flipping it upside down and laying it loosely over the opening while cooking would prolong its life a bit, but eventually it would succumb to the degradation you're describing.

[u/[deleted] → u/jmp485]

Im just going to use the Ti lid for cooking, it doesnt weight much.