Under the Choko Tree By Nevin Sweeney

Cooking With Your Rocket Stove

You can find discussion on how to make a rocket stove here, here and here but what follows are the details on how I use our rocket stove to cook our food.

To start it, crumple up a bit of newspaper and push it down into the combustion chamber without completely obstructing the air intake, get some thin dry twigs and push them into the fuel chamber until the protrude into the combustion chamber. Then drop some lit matches down onto the paper until it catches, it may take a few or you might want to add a few drops of accelerant like kero or metho, but not petrol (Which is too damn dangerous!). Even with the metho make sure not to look down into the combustion chamber when you drop in the match or you may lose an eyebrow or two, think Adam Savage on Mythbusters.

Setting up

While I have read reports of these things starting up “like a rocket” that has not been my experience, it tends to start slow and may take a few minutes to really get going, especially if the fuel is not bone dry or if the weather is cold. Use the same process you normally would for starting a fire – start out with thin easily combustible twigs and then once the fire (combustion chamber) has warmed up you can use twigs up to 10 -12mm in thickness and it will go like a rocket!

This thing DOES go like a rocket!

Due to the output of the rocket stove hitting the bottom of the cooking vessel and then being directed around the sides, it seems to me ideal for use with the rounded shape of a wok and the high heat, high speed also suit the wok style of cooking. The wok ring used to support the wok on top of the rocket stove keeps it pretty close to the right distance from the outlet for the hot gases and the ventilation holes in the side are close to the same surface area as the combustion chamber outlet. In other words all the heat from the twigs hits the bottom of the wok. As an experiment I half filled our most used size of wok half full of water and was able to heat it from dead cold to over 90°C in a 20 minutes or so.

Setting up the fire

While it takes a bit of food preparation, usually done inside, the cooking done on a rocket stove outside is essentially no different in concept from cooking on a barbeque, just a lot quicker and more efficient. I have cooked fried rice, Chinese style omelettes and a number  of stir fries using our rocket stove, and I continue to be amazed at how easy, efficient (and fun!) the cooking is, and it floats my boat that I can cook out dinner with a few twigs grown in the front yard. Following is how I do it –



Preparation is important in this style of cooking so I harvested the veggies I was going to use and cut them up into strips, rounds or small lumps and set them out on two cutting boards ready to be taken outside, I also broke a half a dozen of our home produced eggs into a mug and whisked them with a fork. Alas the noodles I was using were not homemade but bought fresh from our local supermarket. I took all of the ingredients as well as the sauces out onto the back deck in preparation for cooking. I have not gotten around to making legs for the rocket stove so placing it on the back deck while I stand on the ground brings it up to the right height and the deck itself provides plenty of work space to set things out where I can get at them.

The wok in place and heating

Once everything is in place I started the stove and waited until we were getting a good draught of flame out the top, the wok went on top and some oil went in to heat, once the oil was smoking (just a minute or two) the egg went in I moved it around until it was cooked and cut into lumps, I then removed it from the wok into a container. The wok reheated within seconds and I added the veggies one type at a time, onions and hard veggies first, followed by the softer ones with about a minute of cooking between each one and then put the cooked egg back in to reheat.

Cooking the egg

With the eggs and veggies cooked I tossed in the noodles and heated them through and added the sauces, in this case some oyster sauce and char siu (Chinese barbeque) sauce. While the additions and cooking was going on I was keeping an eye on the heat and adding new twigs as the originals burned down. A stoker would be handy but I have been quite able to keep the fire going and still cook with all the dishes that I have made with the rocket stove so far.

A view into the combustion chamber

The dish was finished so I took it inside to eat, removing the largest of the still burning twigs and letting the fire burn down. Once the fire was out, I tipped the small amount of ash left onto one of the veggie patches. So I was able to cook a meal for three, with leftovers, in about 15 minutes or less using just trimmings from the mulberry tree taken last year.

Final cook-up

I did put the rocket stove in the garage as rain was predicted and water in the wood ash insulation removes or reduces any insulating properties and causes it to all clag together, so if you are using wood ash to insulate your rocket stove, keep it dry!

You can even barbecue over a rocket stove (Vegetarians avert your eyes)

BBQing on a rocket stove

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