James,
Chino’s article on “Off Grid Cooking” is an excellent article, however what I have found that cuts cooking time way down especially cooking dried beans is using a small pressure cooker. I have used my cooker many times to cook dried beans or even a roast with good results in a matter of about an hour or less of cooking time. I even tried it over an open campfire with the same results, although that did smoke up the bottom of the pressure cooker.
In the same context I have cooked dried beans in my Dutch Oven by digging a fire pit, starting a fire, letting the wood burn down to coals, putting the Dutch Oven in the coals and covering the oven with more coals and dirt and let them cook all day. The results were okay, but not as well as using the pressure cooker. Randy H. in Asheville, North Carolina
Sir:
A more affordable commercial rocket stove is offered by StoveTec. I own the StoveTec Wood Stove which is currently offered at $72.95 with free shipping. It burns very clean and hot with very little smoke. It does produce some smoke initially, until the heat builds up. While heavy and not as portable as a backpacking stove or even a Coleman camp stove, it only needs a small armload of sticks for fuel. – Bjorn B.
Hi Jim,
I wanted to point out that pinto beans cook in under an hour with the help of a pressure cooker. I’ve also found that they are easier to digest when they’ve been cooked at the high temperature of the pressure cooker, I intend to use mine to cook all of the beans I’ve stored for long periods.
Chino mentions at the beginning that we’re all used to the microwave oven, I’ve thought a few times about how practical a small DC powered microwave oven would be to use along with renewable power, beans will cook in 30 minutes using a microwave, a 200 watt solar panel and battery may be a large enough power source to accomplish this and supply the 0.5 kwh per day required to operate a 1,000 watt microwave for 30 minutes. There are also microwavable pressure cookers, for what that’s worth. I haven’t reached a point where I would stop buying propane because of the low price of propane right now, I’m pretty well convinced that a propane camp-stove and pressure cooker will cook anything in my stockpile most inexpensively. – Jeff M.
JWR Replies: As I mentioned in the Rawles Gets Your Ready Course, it is important to store only about an eight year supply of beans. Beyond that, they get so hard that not amount of soaking or boiling will soften them. Beyond eight years of storage, the only practicable method of cooking them is to use a pressure cooker, or to grind them into meal (“bean flour”) before cooking them.