David in Israel: Off The Grid Cooking

David in Israel Re: Off The Grid Cooking

James:
Since storage food for us is just our daily staples bought and stored in bulk we use pressure cookers for most stovetop cooking instead of a regular pot to save time and fuel. There is no reason to waste hours of fuel simmering or stewing and evaporating that heat into steam when you can keep that thermal energy in your pressure cooker and also be done in under an hour by raising the cooking temp to around 250F. I have had the chance to use a Fagor brand pressure cooker and they are nice and built to last for many years but heavy and expensive. I use an inexpensive but strong aluminum 1.5 liter Hawkins for camping, bike tours, and single servings; our Hawkins 5 liter is plenty for making quick food especially Indian curry dishes for the family from our storage supplies. We have several spare gaskets for the pressure cookers, also some spare overpressure fuses specific to the UL safety-rated Hawkins cookers. Only buy cookers that can handle 15 p.s.i. and are UL safety rated. (Most yard sale cookers made before the 1980s are potential steam bombs.)

We discontinued our propane gas service years ago and after we needed more heat for some Chinese wok cooking, I brought out my MSR XGK stove and we ended up running an experiment for nine months using our camping stoves exclusively for stove top type cooking. It worked quite well on white gas and gasoline but was touchy burning stored kerosene. After contacting MSR they replaced the flame plate on my older stove from the early 1990s, this turned the XGK into a hot clean blue flame kerosene burner. My only issue with the mostly bulletproof XGK is the learning curve for getting a good simmer flame, and that the fragile pump found on older XGK stoves should be replaced (MSR has a refurb special for $20) and the flame plate be replaced with the dished model which makes heavy fuels burn much better. I also recommend storing some denatured ethanol from the paint store to use as priming fuel, 1-2 ml is all that is needed for priming to provide a clean startup with heavy fuels. Shalom, – David in Israel