I’m a firm believer in redundancy or the old adage,” one is none and two is one”. Over the last few months, I’ve put a lot of time and effort into experimenting with different methods of boiling water and cooking off grid. While I haven’t tested them all by any means, I’ve tested several and I have come to some interesting conclusions. Who knows, maybe my experiments will save you some time or perhaps cause you to reconsider an option for cooking that you have put in your preps, that might not work as good as you thought.
To begin, I’ll break the methods down into what each type of cooking uses for fuel.
- solar
- fire
- compressed gas
Solar is the easiest to address. I’ve built and cooked with a solar oven. They typically take several hours and some monitoring and repositioning, but they work well and are easy to build, and not terribly expensive to buy. I’ve even got water to boil in the one I made.Here is a picture of mine, before I made reflectors for it.
It worked fairly well like this, but when I made reflectors and found the optimal angle to attach them at, my internal temps went way past 300 degrees.
Fire is the next type of fuel I’d like to discuss. Of course, you can just light a fire and use that to cook over. It worked for our ancestors and still works today. However, the type of fire I’ve become confident in for its survival applications is fire that burns hot enough to both create woodgas, in a device designed to take advantage of that woodgas and burn it off before it exhausts from the device. Those are a rockets stoves and woodgas stoves.
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