Letter: Rocket Stove & Slow Cooking

Mr. Rawles, SurvivalBlog is one of our daily Internet staples. My family has gleaned far too much from the site to ignore. Today’s article on rocket stoves and a reader’s submission touting the benefits of a slow cooker were meant to go together, maybe even Heaven sent.

We have a slow cooker, and we also have a rocket stove. However, in a hunker down crisis the slow cooker becomes almost useless without using an alternate AC source. But the rocket stove, grid down, becomes a wonderful item to have in your quiver of preps. It excels in heating items quickly and does so with minimal “fuel”. Blending the two together opens up a whole new realm of menu possibilities.

As said, the rocket stove excels at fast and high heat, many examples offer the speed at which water can be boiled. Well, high heat is not synonymous with slow cooking. However, if the contents of a meal can be heated to a boil and the residual heat contained and protected from heat loss, the cooking process can be completed in the same means as the typical slow cooker albeit much slower and, if done properly, without any of those wonderful aromas associated with slow cooking. The key part is retaining the heat.

Insulation can be had from multiple sources. 1. Multiple (I mean a lot of towels) surrounding the cooking vessel completely– top, sides and bottom. 2. A good cooler surrounding multiple towels/insulation. 3. Something called a ”Wonderbag”. It’s a cloth cozy with a depression in the middle for a cooking vessel and another cloth cozy for the top. It looks like a bean bag for a pot with a thick bean bag top. (This could be a nice cottage industry for a seamstress. Sell the unit without the Styrofoam beads and let the buyer complete the project.) – T2