Make Your Own Damn Stove

Once upon a time, I made Trouble Affogato from a recipe in the Tartine Bread cookbook. The author of the book, Chad Robertson, based the flavors of the affogato on the "house" breakfast at Trouble Coffee (one of his favorite San Francisco beachside cafés): thick-cut, generously buttered cinnamon toast, strong black coffee, and a whole, young coconut, served with a straw and a spoon. Naturally, when Mom and I were in San Francisco last April, we had to go find Trouble Coffee. And reading the Lonely Planet guidebook for directions, for the first time I encountered the full name of Trouble's signature dish:

Build Your Own Damn House.

I have no idea what that has to do with coffee, toast, or coconuts, but I was ensorcelled. "Build your damn house!" turned into the mantra of the year. Or possibly of my life. Their website reads like a scrap off a Dr Bronner's bottle. "Do you have a useful skill in a tangible situation?" God, I hope so. It is one of my personal missions: to have useful skills. Convenience is for the stupid, the lazy, and the infirm. If I can make something myself, I will. It's fun--fun in the way that occupies my brain and my hands at the same time. Change your own damn tires. Bake your own damn bread. Find your own damn Christmas tree. Build your own damn house.

So it was with sore pride that I ordered a tarp-tent, because I just can't pretend that I know enough to make one myself. Sewing isn't the problem--I'm a decent seamstress--but I don't know anything about tarps, or ripstop nylon, and my better judgment says that I will be a warmer, drier, happier hiker with someone else's handiwork holding the roof over my head. I stand in a fair way to order my sleeping bag and backpack for the same reasons. Do you know how to stuff something with goose feathers? Well neither do I. And I am SAD about this. I wanted to make my gear from scratch, really own this project from the ground up.

Lucky for me, there are enough penny-pinching gram-weenies on the Internet to support my fixation and direct this energy toward other, lesser, but worthy projects. Andrew Skurka is one such nut, and he generously shows the whole world how to make a lightweight, portable alcohol stove out of a catfood can. Yeah! Build your own damn stove!

punch two tidy rows of holes in a clean catfood can. done.

Skurka sums up the pros and cons of his approach very neatly:

advantages
-weighs just .3 oz (about 10 grams)!
-costs about $.50 for the cat food can with tax, and $3-$5 for the hole punch.
-will never clog, no moving or delicate parts that can break. Even if it is accidentally squashed, there is a chance that it can be re-shaped and used again.
-serves as a pot stand, which means one less thing to carry.
-burns denatured alcohol, a cheap and widely available fuel that can be purchased at hardware stores (in the paint department), gas stations (HEET gas-line antifreeze), and hiking hostels. You can also use Everclear, or grain alcohol, though this is more expensive. Fuel can be stored in plastic drink bottles.
-uses about .6 oz of alcohol to boil about 1.5 cups of water, depending on the pot, the starting temperature of the water, and the efficiency of the windscreen. The water will boil within 5-7 minutes.

disadvantages
-because the stove is only 2.5 inches in diameter, larger pots may not be stable enough.
-because this stove is a side-burner, smaller pots (e.g. 600 ml mugs) may not receive enough of the flame. In this case, it’d probably be more efficient to make a top-burner model instead.
-does not have a simmer feature, i.e. there is no control over the flame output. This will not be a problem if the extent of your backcountry cooking skills is boiling (the only thing necessary if you are content with pasta, couscous, dehydrated and freeze-dried foods, potato flakes, soups, etc).
-no OFF switch. The stove will burn until there is no more fuel to burn, unless it is smothered with a pot/mug, dirt, or water. It is extremely difficult, though possible, to blow the stove out.
-not as fast as a white gas or canister model. If eating dinner 2-3 minutes earlier is important enough to you that you are willing to carry at least an extra half-pound, by all means… 

The one thing he fails to mention about the Fancy Feast stove--because he is plainly not a cat-owner if he had to go out and buy a can of food specifically to this purpose--is that it feels like a kind of talisman. This stove was within reach all along and I had no idea. I've opened literally hundreds of those cans and dispensed the contents to my cat-friends while waiting for water to boil for coffee. It's the morning ritual. I hate canned catfood, I think it is wasteful and disgusting, and I wish my idiot cats would deign to eat food-grade roast chicken and turkey giblets like reasonable creatures. But the trashy canned food always makes them so happy, without fail. By the time I get to Tahoe and am heating up water for the ten-thousandth goddam packet of Idahoan instant potatoes, that will be something worth remembering.

"grease pot" from Kmart; homemade Fancy Feast stove; aluminum foil windscreen; fuel from hardware store

A lot of hikers have the Evernew titanium 0.9L cooking pot, and that's nice, I suppose. (SCORN.) But I've actually never bought a new pot, not ever, and I'm afraid that if I shell out $60 on a piece of cookware I won't be content to back away slowly when a bear invades my camp to steal my rehydrated potatoes, I will indignantly yell, "Hey!" and fight him for the fancy titanium pot.

Wandering through some Make-Your-Own-Gear literature one day, I discovered several voices lauding the cheapness, lightness, and versatility of Ye Olde Grease Pot. The grease saver costs $10 at Kmart, and the funny part of this story is that Mom and Dad already owned one. Aluminum isn't as durable as titanium, of course, so you probably want to avoid stepping on your cookpot just as you avoid stepping on your stove, but even if I manage to destroy it utterly--or lose it to a bear--I'd have to replace six grease pots before I could justify the titanium model. And I dunno, it kind of suits the Fancy Feast stove, don't you think? They're a pair.

pour a little fuel in the can, light it, and allow it to warm up 15-20 seconds

center your cooking pot over the stove and wrap the windscreen around it

when the water boils, add your food, and put the lid back on

hot dogtopus' garden (in the shade)

I don't remember the last time I ate Top Ramen. It's pretty gross, even after I'd gussied it up (those are good local hot dogtopi, not Oscar Meyer). Plainly, what one can cook on the trail directly impacts what one eats, but that isn't a discussion I'm prepared to have yet. We'll talk about food later. Right now we're talking about stoves. Do you want a catfood can? I have lots! Make your own damn stove!