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How To Cook On An Alcohol Stove
Finally you get to sit down and eat. Say you’re on the trail. You’ve been hiking for hours and hours. You’re hungry. You want to eat. You stop and put your pack down. Then what? How do you do this with an alcohol stove?
Think about what you do now. It’s about the same routine as with any other stove. A homemade alcohol cook set is a little different from a commercial cook set. More like a kit. Not to worry, you are now having an adventure. Relax. This is not a dress rehearsal for life, it is the real thing, and you are officially alive and having fun. Don’t argue with me, not even a little. Follow along.
If this is your first time using an ultralight alcohol stove, then take your normal outfit with you, down to your old stove. Everything. It will be there as a backup, a safety net, so you will have nothing to fear. It will stay by your side, waiting patiently in case you need it, and there’s a good chance that you won’t, but it will still be there to comfort you. Make the switch over to exclusive use of an ultralight stove when you feel comfortable with it. At your own speed and in your own time. This is not a competition.
Now, back to the subject at hand. The first thing to remember is not to set the ground on fire. Or anything else. Not at all, except for the stove of course.
Find a nice flat spot. Ideally you will find a level slab of clean concrete every place you stop to cook, but of course you will never come across anything like this. Rock is as close as you can get. While rock is nice it will not negotiate with you. Barring unexpected discovery of an absolutely flat, professionally finished concrete slab wherever you happen to stop, you need a surface that will deal with you, that has some give, a surface that will converse with you and adapt to your needs. Rock won’t burn, which is nice, very nice in fact, but if it’s lumpy or leaning one way or the other, it won’t get any better. The lump and the lean are all you get. Rock will not listen to reason. Rock will not adapt to your needs.
Aside from a chance encounter with a large stone that is smooth enough and level enough, you should look for “mineral soil”. “Mineral soil” is soil that is pure sand or plain gravel or clean dirt, or a mixture of them. Nothing but minerals that will not burn. Sand does not burn, and gravel does not, nor does clean dirt. (Like “jumbo shrimp”, “living dead”, and “relatively unique”, the phrase clean dirt is an oxymoron for most people. But for backpackers, clean dirt really is clean — clean of all burnable things.) Mineral soils like bare rock will not burn, but they can be molded and scraped to accommodate you, unlike rock.
A stream bed is good, especially if there is a shady sandbar in it where you can escape most of the bugs, and have ready access to water. If you’re on a quiet trail and have no other choices, then sometimes you can set up right there, in the middle of the trail. If you do try this gambit, then be really, really sure that you will have no unexpected guests dropping in. About the last thing you need is a dozen lug-soled hikers tramping through your kitchen while you try to cook.
If you’re on solid ground, in the trail or otherwise, pick a spot and thump the earth. If it sounds hollow, then you are standing on several inches of compacted forest duff. That’s another way of saying compacted pine needles, branches, flakes of bark, compressed leaves and grass. That’s another way of saying a forest fire just waiting to happen. Go somewhere else. To set up there is about as safe as trying to cook on your couch.
Sometimes the soil is better, and there’s only a thin layer of duff or debris on top of mineral soil. In that case you can scrape your way down to a safe surface. That’s OK. Follow the same rules as if you were going to start a wood fire. But you aren’t, so you’ll have a decent safety margin. Once you have a level, non-combustible surface, you are ready to cook.
Open up the wind screen and set it aside.
Set out the bottom reflector. This goes under the stove and provides extra fire insurance there. Besides, it reflects heat back up toward your cooking pot instead of letting it be absorbed by the earth. Think of efficiency. This is efficiency in action, and it will bring you a hot meal.
Next, set down your pot stand and test it by rocking it with your hand to make sure that you find the most stable spot. Then try the same maneuver after putting your empty pot on top. If your pot stand is built into the stove, then use the whole stove, but still do the test.
If you need to find a better spot, do it now. This is a golden window of opportunity. You really don’t want the whole thing to fall over just as you’re finishing up your cooking, and have already begun to drool. Going to bed hungry is a just punishment for stupidity, but is not fun. Since you’re traveling light, and have intelligently reduced your safety margin to a minimum level, you are not carrying much extra food in your pack, if any. Meals you mess up come right off your spare tire, if you have one, and it’s an unpleasant way to deflate it.
Fill your cooking pot with water while it is sitting firmly on the ground. (We’re assuming that you are just heating water, and not doing traditional in-the-pot cooking.) Put the lid on and place the pot on the pot stand or stove and see if it wiggles too much or leans too far one way or the other. This is your final test, a last safety check.
If everything seems OK, then set the pot to one side and put fuel in the stove. How much fuel depends on several things. For a simple rule of thumb, try a touch more than half an ounce to get 16 ounces of water hot enough for a really quick-cooking meal, something like instant mashed potatoes or couscous. Exactly how much fuel you need depends on the water temperature, the size and shape of the pot, the design of your stove, wind speed, air temperature, how well your cook set is made, and how carefully you’ve set everything up. You’ll learn to judge and fudge with experience. A tenth of an ounce of alcohol either way is usually enough to make a noticeable difference. You’ll tune in quickly after a few meals on the trail.
Use the cap of your fuel bottle as a measure. Most caps (they are pretty standard these days) hold about one quarter ounce. Whatever you use, whether it’s a bottle cap or something else, it’s a good idea to take a spare. Small things like these will run away whenever they get a chance. Half an ounce of fuel will burn roughly nine to 12 minutes, depending on your particular stove and conditions in general.
So then, back to the stove. Fuel it with the pot and pot stand sitting nearby. Light the fuel, put back the pot stand, put the pot on the stand (with the lid on the pot), and then fit the wind screen around it all. On the downwind side of the wind screen, leave a finger’s-width of space near the ground so that the stove can breathe. This is if you have a full-coverage wind screen, like a fat, inverted cup of aluminum foil. If your wind screen is open at the top then you don’t have to fuss with this, but it will also be a less-efficient wind screen.
Most small alcohol stoves are much easier to light with matches than with lighters. Some of these stoves require priming, and those would be easier to get at with a lighter since they have fuel on top or in a cup at the bottom of the stove’s outside, but most alcohol stoves are one variety or another of the basic cup shape, so it’s hard to poke a cigarette lighter down inside without burning your fingers.
When things are running, hold your bare wrist a few inches above the wind screen. You should begin to feel some heat coming up from the stove. Things get hotter as the stove warms up, and this can burn you when the stove is running at full throttle (after a minute or two) so be careful. You will learn judgment as time goes on. Later, after the stove has gone out, you’ll still be able to feel some heat, but not nearly as much. This is residual heat leaking out of the pot.
Since an alcohol stove is so quiet, guessing when it will burn out is an important skill to learn, as is testing its actual heat output. A few days on the trail and you’ll be handling this like a pro. Don’t worry about taking notes or carrying a watch. It will come to you. Let it happen.
Time to cook!
Open up the ziplock bag that your meal is in, and then put on your gloves or grab your pot lifter.
Carefully (slowly) lift off the wind screen. You don’t want to spill all your hot water at this point so be delicate. Gently remove the pot’s lid and pour hot water into the food bag, holding the bag with one hand and the pot with the other. If you pour hot water onto your hand, you’re going to be really, really sorry you did, so be careful with this step. Keep the thumb of your pouring hand out of the hot water in the pot, too, in case you’re wearing gloves instead of using a pot lifter.
Keep one hand on the bag at all times while pouring. If the bag falls over, then refer to the section above about going to bed without supper. Mommy can’t kiss you and make it all better. You will just be SO hungry all night.
Keep your gloves on, squeeze the air out of the bag, and then seal it. Carefully moosh the food around inside the bag, massaging it for a minute or so until everything is well mixed.
If you didn’t buy brand-name freezer bags, then you might find that a bag will occasionally leak, or be hard to re-seal. Once more, recall the part about going to bed without supper. Brand X bags just are not made as well. Don’t try to skimp. I’ve been there. Remember to use the FREEZER bags too. They’re thicker.
Set the bag aside, preferably inside an insulated cozy.
You can make a cozy from an old sleeping pad or even scraps of fleece fabric. When not cooking, you can use the cozy to contain your cook set, so a cozy does double duty. If you don’t have a cozy you can take off your gloves and cup them around the food bag in a protected spot. Or use a pullover cap if you brought one to sleep in.
In about 10 minutes the food will be cool enough to eat, and if you paid attention and brought really instant instant food like mashed potatoes, couscous or ramen, it will be completely cooked too. Minute rice, ground grains and similar foods don’t cook thoroughly this way. If you don’t believe me, then go ahead and do your own experiments, preferably at home, where you can either throw out the bad food or finish cooking it on your kitchen stove. It’s less exciting to learn this at home, believe me.
Let’s say you also want a hot drink like coffee or tea. So while your meal is finishing up its cooking cycle on residual heat, inside some kind of cozy, go ahead and recharge the cooking pot, and prepare the stove once more. Use about two-thirds to three-quarters as much water as you’ll need.
If making tea, then drop a tea bag into into the cold water and just leave it there, and light the stove. Be sure the water gets good and hot but doesn’t boil, or it will foam over and mess up your stove. Leave the tea bag alone after the flame goes out, and it will finish brewing right there. Your drink will stay hot inside the wind screen-sheltered pot until you’re done eating. A wind screen, especially a full-coverage one, will do a surprisingly good job of keeping heat in. About the time you finish eating you can pull the screen off, remove the tea bag, top up with cold water, and down your drink.
When you’ve practiced this a few times you’ll be able to cook, then put on tea, be eating supper a few minutes after the tea starts brewing, and have a nice cup of drinkable tea about the time you finish supper.
One more thing — use treated water for cooking, either filtered or chemically treated. That way you don’t have to boil the heck out of it just to be sure it’s safe, and you don’t have to worry either.