Learning to cook on a rocket stove
Our power was out for
about 21 hours Sunday afternoon through Monday morning. That
seemed like the perfect opportunity to try out the new rocket stove that our neighbor gave us!
I'd like to be able to
tell you "I only needed two sticks of wood to scramble our breakfast
eggs," but the truth is that this first iteration of rocket-stove
cookery was a learning experience. What I mostly learned is that
damp wood doesn't fly in rocket stoves --- I didn't really get the fire
blazing until I tracked down the piece of kindling in the middle of the
photo above, which had been sitting in our woodshed for a couple of
years and was bone dry. The sticks that have been drying on the
porch for a week mostly smoldered instead of burning.
Perhaps because I only
ended up using one dry piece of wood, the temperature in the skillet on
top of the rocket stove never got warmer than what equates to about
medium on our electric range. That's fine for scrambling eggs, and
would be great for things like soups, but for my next experiment I look
forward to trying out the skirt that fits around a pot to increase the
stove's efficiency by 25%. I also want to get a more solid handle
on exactly how much wood the rocket stove consumes, although I have to
say that I'm already impressed in that regard.
What was the biggest
surprise about making breakfast on the rocket stove? How much I
enjoyed the fire therapy! Usually, I get a little cranky during
power outages due to internet deprivation, but a dose of fire first
thing in the morning instead set me singing happily as I weeded the
garden. Of course, it doesn't hurt that our Cyberpower Battery Backup combined with my laptop battery means I can enjoy about an hour and a half of blogging time even while the grid is down.
In case you're curious, everything in the freezer
stayed frozen during the outage, despite highs that nearly reached
90. If the juice had stayed off for more than 24 hours, though, we
would have topped off the cold with our generator.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Always great to read your blog Anna. I'm considering using a rocket stove in my place when I get it.
You warm your house and are now cooking with wood. Do you ever notice the wood smoke smell on yourselves? Maybe when you venture out into the world. When we camp I don't notice the smell and even like it but the minute we are back home I can't stand the smell. Does your home smell of wood smoke? How about your food, does it ever change depending on what is burning?