Cooking

I think there is a huge difference between long term “bug-in” survival preparations, and short term “bug-out” survival preparations. Depending on your situation, bug-out might be your only option. As I explained in my bugout pack article, most of what you carry should be food. And though cooking may seem like a luxury for a survival situation, you’ll find that most inexpensive and calorie dense foods need to be cooked. You don’t want to carry a lot of water, when you can pick up water and cook dry food on the road. That means you should also carry a stove, and that stove needs to be light, efficient with fuel, and it should be able to cook your food in a reasonable amount of time. In my travels for this column I have covered a number of great cooking options, but this week I’d like to share my newest discovery that all of those qualities considered, I think might be the best for urban bug-out.

This is my second installment in two weeks on stovetop baking. As promised, this week we take a look at a variety of kerosene stoves that I run with diesel fuel, using ovens made for the stovetop. It is not by accident that propane has become ubiquitous in camp stoves, because propane is never smokey and regulating the burn is easy with modern equipment. The problem is, propane requires a pressurized tank to store it, and by the gallon, propane is two to three times the cost per BTU of gasoline and diesel. Of gasoline and diesel, diesel is safer and easier to store, and of stoves that will burn diesel, the wick varieties are easier to control, and they don’t need pumping.

Resources: Portable Woodstove $58.95 Shipped on Ebay SilverFire Hunter Rocket Stove $219 Butterfly Oven – $79 St. Paul Mercantile Perfection Oven – Lehmans $219 Have you noticed that survival is almost always a Catch 22? And by that I don’t mean rimfire lol. What I mean is you have to make a choice in just [...]

My whole paradigm on cooking has changed since starting this column. I was like most Americans. When it comes to off the grid cooking, propane was the way to go. 2nd to that was white gas, otherwise known as Coleman Fuel. What I have come to understand is that from a survival perspective, both of those fuels will be extremely rare. I have discovered wood burning “Rocket Stoves” for prior articles, and my latest fascination is with stoves like you’ll see this week that were made for kerosene. As I have explained in past weeks, these stoves burn regular gaspump diesel just as clean as kerosene, which is getting harder and harder to find, especially at a reasonable price. Diesel has to meet new EPA standards for sulfur emissions, and that has made it almost indistinguishable from kerosene. Diesel does not produce flammable fumes, and if you toss a match into a puddle of diesel, the match will go out. If you are storing fuel for the collapse, diesel is your best option, but you do need stoves for cooking and heaters for heating that are specifically designed for kerosene to burn it in a useful way.

This week will be my first installment into canning food in steel cans. Think of it this way. You haven’t eaten in a week. You just killed a deer. You really would like to be able to eat venison next week without having to kill another deer. What do you do?

I have discovered in writing this column that Americans have become victims of convenience. Propane stoves are probably the best example of this from a survival perspective. We have all grown up with propane stoves for any type of outdoor cooking. They burn clean and never smoke, but for survival, where all the fuel we [...]

Thermoelectric generators are not a new technology. “TEG” power was discovered in 1821, but I have to admit, it is new to me. I recently discovered three consumer products that create electricity from direct heat, and all three of them have survival applications. One of them is the best bugout or camp stove I have ever encountered, and I would take it one step further and say that it is the best bugout cooking solution I have ever encountered, period. A second is made for generating electricity while you cook your dinner, and I had marginal success with it. The third is made for a high level of direct heat electricity production, and you can drive it from your rocket stove, a camp stove, and they have models from 10 watts up to 100 watts that use waste heat from your wood stove.

One of the most embarrassing moments for a prepper is not being able to light your Rocket Stove with a butane lighter stick after half an hour. And since this has happened to me a couple times, it got me to thinking about what I would have to go through on the road, trying to cook dinner. Sticks, leaves and even pine needles on the ground absorb water. They may look dry, but try to light them and have them stay lit. So I went looking for firestarting help, and I found some pretty good options. The most important thing is that I tested them with a “flint and steel,” because matches get wet, and you run out of matches. In an afternoon of trying to start fires, I ended up with a sore arm and some good experience with what of my experiments worked, and which ones didn’t.

I love finding useful things that handy people can make themselves, and that the rest of us can buy cheap. If you follow this column, you already know that I fell in love with the StoveTec “Rocket Stove.” I still see them from $75 to $150 on Ebay all the time, and as a stay at home stove, I don’t think you can beat it. But as I discussed last week in my overview of bugout bags, if you are stuck on the road, the StoveTec is just too big and heavy. I have been on a quest for some time for a smaller, lighter, more portable contraption that does the same thing as my StoveTec. Right now I have a few products on the way, but in the meantime, I’d like to share a cool stove I got a few months ago that I just tried last week. It is made from square tubular steel, and the guy who makes them on Ebay adds legs, as well as a baffle, so that the stove burns reliably.