I thought I would share a couple of pieces of my preparedness kit with y’all. This is my Eco Zoom Versa two door rocket stove. I love this thing, it is just an awesome piece of kit. The beauty of the two door stoves, for those that aren’t familiar with them, is that they not only function as a biofuel/stick burner, which works very well for frying things in a skillet, or to quickly heat water, but it can also burn charcoal, or regular coal for longer cook times.
Using the charcoal feature gives you the ability to use a camp oven on top of the stove. Even without a wind screen (and it was about 42F outside) it was able to hold my Butterfly oven at 350 to 375 for over an hour on just a couple of handfuls of charcoal. And this was a busted bag of charcoal that’s been sitting on the ground outside, under my overhang for over 4 years. It is a very efficient stove and takes surprisingly little fuel to get the job done.
This setup lets you do things like make biscuits, cornbread, casseroles, and the like easily in an off grid environment. I’ve even boiled a chicken down and made a pot of chicken and dumpling one time at fish camp, just to see if I could. It is also powerful enough to drive a pressure canner.
Using it as a stick burner is a bit labor intensive, and you need to baby it a bit when cooking. It is not difficult, but you must watch it and keep fuel in the firebox. Not a big deal at all for short cooking tasks like cooking some eggs, or heating some water for coffee, or tea. There is just not much room for muti tasking, or you’ll find your fire dies down, and your cooking temps drop off. Stick burning also will soot up your cookware some, but not nearly as badly as cooking over a campfire. Charcoal and coal leave your cookware much cleaner. I deal with this by having a couple pieces of dedicated cookware for camp cooking.
Fuel for it is easy to source, and you can cook entire meals on sticks and scraps that you wouldn’t waste your time loading into the woodstove in the house. The ideal size sticks for it are about the diameter of your thumb, or slightly smaller.
They don’t sell the Versa in the US anymore, as least that I can find, but there are several Chinese copycats that are virtually identical on Amazon, and eBay.
Edited by Juthro, 02 May 2022 - 01:49 PM.