The Kitchen Gourmet 32 Oz. Hot Pot - a Product Review

About a year ago, I decided to get all Fancypants with my morning coffee. No longer content with the old cheap drip coffee maker I'd had forever, I decided to invest in a French press due to the (supposedly) superior flavor that boiling coffee that way produces. I rationalized the expense by also telling myself that I could easily boil loose-leaf tea now, which is generally both more inexpensive and better quality than Lipton or Stash tea bags from the supermarket.

There was one problem, though - actually boiling the water. I'm not a microwave fan, so that option was out. That left the stove top, but I was concerned my pans and saucepans would have residue due to their heavy use that might make the water impure and the beverages taste weird. So what to do? Shell out an extra $10 at Walgreens for the Kitchen Gourmet Hot Pot!

Though I personally use it just for boiling water, the hot pot is 32 oz. and gets up to about 350 degrees Fahrenheit, so it actually has a range of uses. You can boil eggs and veggies in it, cook rice and pasta, heat soups, probably even boil little slices of meat if you're really determined. It's fairly easy to clean - obviously, if you're cooking food in it there will be a little more elbow grease with some mild soap involved, but for boiling water I just need to scrub the interior out with a little apple cider vinegar once every few weeks or so.

It's a little on the bulky side for travel, but extremely light due to nearly-all-plastic construction. I don't know if you could stuff it into a backpack, but it could easily make it into a suitcase. It makes for a pretty versatile little cooking instrument if you're away from a kitchen.

Now of course, this is a review and not a sales pitch, so it's time to mention the downsides. The biggest one is probably that the temperature settings are not marked, there's just a sliding scale of dots ranging from "low" to "high." Since the temperature at which coffee/tea is boiled is actually pretty important (especially for green tea!), I actually stuck a thermometer in the pot while full of water and marked the temperature settings on the side in black permanent marker. If the pot had been more expensive I might be a little peeved about that, but for $10 I'm willing to do some simple work. But this does also limit your potential temperature settings from about 125 to 350 Fahrenheit in increments of about 25 degrees. Another minor issue is that the lid hinge started creaking loudly after a few months of use. I could probably solve this myself pretty easily with a little lithium grease but honestly, it doesn't bother me enough to even bother to do that. The final issue is one endemic to all Kitchen Gourmet products - a short power cord. It's not as ridiculously short as some of their other products (you get a good two feet this time instead of the usual one), but still enough so to pose some problems if you're up on a kitchen countertop and the outlets are down near ankle level.

The problems are very minor and easy to roll with for 10 bucks, however, and this thing has stood up to a year of almost-daily use like a champ. One final note - for some reason this product doesn't seem to be listed anywhere on Walgreens' web site, yet I've seen it for sale in nearly every store of theirs that has kitchenwares.