Clean Cooking

A lot of forests are destroyed worldwide, when people cut down trees for fire wood. It is bad for the environment to make the charcoal from wood. It is a big problem everywhere. The soil is loose and washed away by rain and carried away by wind (= erosion). It is very important to think about, how we cook every day our food and what we can improve there.

In Western countries they use mostly electricity and cooking gas. This is very convenient and easy to use, but creates many problems as well.

Electric cookers use electricity, which is mostly produced in bad ways (coal, oil, nuclear energy).

Cooking gas is also harmful for the environment and a side product of oil. Oil and gas are transported through pipelines that often leak.

Most gas and charcoal cookers loose a lot of heat and are not built in a effective way.

A well tended fire is actually often more effective than a gas cooker.

Remember the last hot season and how foggy it was nearly the whole day. The airplanes couldn't land anymore in the mornings or around noon. This was caused by all the charcoal cooking fires together with farmers burning down their fields.

Using clean cookers is very important to protect our nature for us and our children.

Cookers:

heat retention cooker

isolate the cooking pot (hay box, wonder bag), very old technique, werepart of the stoves until 1940s

biomass gassifier stoves

use leaves and rice husk and small sticks

Heat retention

Instead of keeping the fire going, you take the pot off the fire and put it in a box or bag and keep the heat in it. If you do it well, the pot will stay very very hot and the food will cook itself. It is very simple and effective and no work at all. The pot needsto be totally full, with no air on top of it or it will loose heat there. It works great forrice, curries and soups (stews). It is very cheap as well. It is a very old technique, which was forgotten, but is revived now. Everybody can build this in his house. It onlyneeds some blankets or bags with rice husk. It was common in Western kitchens until the 1940s. The earliest finds are from around 1000 .

Biomass gassifier

burns small pieces of biomass like rice husk or leaves, small twigs, wood shavings at a high temperature. The biomass becomes a hot burning gas, which goes up. There different systems (up-draft and down-draft, with or without fan) They burn very hot and effective. Rice husk is thrown away or burnt on the fields. It is a much cheaper fuel than charcoal. Grows back fast. Every year. (= renewable)

others:

Rocket cooker

burns very efficiently wood

basic rocket with pot skirt

diy rocket

diy rocket

combined charcoal & rocket stove

There are many different versions, how to build one yourself. You create a burn (combustion) chamber with a chimney. It creates an updraft and the wood burns very strongly and hot. It makes a sound like a rocket, when it burns. It needs a space to suck in air. It does not work with charcoal, unless you build a combination one.

I built one, but the burn chamber is too small for charcoal and it is very difficult to fry some eggs on it. When you pour one with concrete in a bucket put first a plastic bag, that you can get it out easily later. My son tried to build one and got it stuck in the bucket. You need to have the right relationship between burn chamber and chimney, that it works well. You should put a metal (pot skirt) between cooker and pot, to loose less heat there.

The main problem is, that you cook with wood. You need to have this wood anyway, it should be otherwise useless and lying on the ground and you can use small pieces. Charcoal needs big pieces. It doesn't make sense to cut trees to cook with a rocket cooker!

diy from food tinsafter a short time it will look like this

Here are more examples for rocket cookers from other parts of the world! Be inspired.

bio gas stove

uses cooking waste, animal or human manure (=poo) to produce

methane gas

needs a digester where the gas is produced plus a gas cooker

makes sense on a farm, anywhere, where you have waste or manure

it is often used in India and there are many models to build yourself

you can also produce electricity from the gas with a generator

Solar stoves

Not a stove, but works very well! A fridge, running on water! A Zeer pot

You need to 2 clay flower pots,

close the holes in the bottom with cement,

fill the space with clean fine sand,

it works best in shadow with lots of airflow.

The water evaporates and this cools.

Inside will be 4-10 degrees cooler than outside,

it works especially well with vegetables.

I have one in my room! It really works.