Candle Stove

 

It is cold here in the mid-west today!! It is suppose to get even colder. By the end of this week it is suppose to get below zero along with a snow storm. Which has me thinking...suppose the grid went down this week, how would some people be able to cook their food?

A wood burning cook stove would be an awesome answer to that problem. So would a generator. A grill or camp stoves would also work. But...and that is an important but...if the temperatures really do get below zero, using a grill or camp stove, would be very dangerous. Because being out in the cold long enough to cook anything on those, even in the shelter of a garage with the doors open, it would be cold enough that it could cause the onset of hypothermia fairly quickly...which could make for a very bad day for you. What about those people that live in an apartment, and elsewhere, where they wouldn't be able to have those options available to them? What would they do?

A candle stove is a very short-term, temporary, fix for in that kind of situations. While you can buy candle stoves online, I have to wonder why anyone would since they are so easy and fast to make yourself with things most people have on hand.

The picture at the top pretty well shows how to make one yourself, but I will break it down:

 

Place your candle(s) in a sink. You will need to try to get the candles as close to your pot or pan as possible, without the flame actually touching the pot. The candles that I used were not tall enough to for the maximum amount of heat to reach the pan. So, I inverted a cake pan and placed the candles on top of the cake pan.

 

 

I then placed a rack across my sink. The rack that I used was from one of our grills, but a rack from an oven would also work. Ta-da!!! You now have a candle stove. Easy wasn't it?

 

It does take a lot longer to cook on a candle stove than normal. It took me 35 minutes to boil some water and 40 minutes to fry scrambled eggs. Obviously the more candles the hotter the air will be and the faster the food will cook. Just don't have so many candles that you end up setting your kitchen on fire.

I tented the pot and the air around the the pot with aluminum to see if that would improve the cooking time. It greatly increased the efficiency of this method, but if you try this, make sure to use hot pads when removing the aluminum foil or the pot. They both get hot very quickly.

Some foods that are easy to cook using the candle stove method are: hot dogs, soups, grilled cheese sandwiches, chili, warmed canned chicken added to instant or canned gravy added and then placed over some instant rice. Oh yes....s'mores are awesome to make this way too. :-)

Thanks for reading.