Living in London, cooking on a barbecue often means using a disposable barbecue that lacks any decent power or ease of use. The EcoZoom rocket stove can easily cook all your favorite recipes using a simple griddle pan.

I live in the UK and regularly use EcoZoom rocket stoves for outside cooking. A question I often get asked by friends is ‘can you barbecue with it?’ Now, a barbecue is wonderful thing but it isn’t always practical. Here in the UK people often use disposable barbecues, which are expensive, hard to light and have terrible heat output – under-cooking food is never a good idea. Not to mention, one-and-done cooking options aren’t as sustainable as an EcoZoom Versa, which is built to last for up to 13,000 hours of cooking using small amounts of fuel to generate as much heat as you will likely need (up to 23,000 BTUs).

While the EcoZoom product line doesn’t currently include a barbeque grill attachment, you can grill meat and vegetables just as well – this is how I do it with a griddle pan.

Fire up your EcoZoom Versa rocket stove with wood or charcoal and oil up the griddle pan. When the stove is putting out a nice amount of steady heat place the griddle on the cast iron top. The trick is to move the griddle around on the hob a bit, don’t just leave it in one spot, this spreads the heat more evenly around it. If you are cooking with a pot or pan that fits the included pot skirt that comes with each stove, you can place it around the bottom of your pot or pan to ensure that heat is transferred evenly across the bottom and lower sides of the pot/pan.

When you can smell the heated oil in the griddle it is time to start cooking! Vegetables (eg peppers) need more oil, but meats bring their own. Lift the food up from time to time to ensure your food doesn’t stick too much to the griddle. While cooking, if too much oil comes from the meat just pour it off gently.  Now you do the rest, cook it just how you like it! Your Ecozoom Versa will do the heavy lifting by providing ample of amounts of heat to cook with until all the food is ready to your liking. As with all things, take care and use a glove to hold the griddle handle, it will get very hot.

EcoZoom rocket stoves are capable of taking on just about any cooking task. Whether it is a temperature sensitive recipe, or multi-hour simmer, EcoZoom stoves are up to the task. Here in the UK, it is a great barbeque alternative and helps avoid using disposable barbeques that leave much to be desired in terms of an outdoor cooking option.

About the Author: Stewart MacLachlan lives in London and is an avid EcoZoom’er. He loves to cook on his EcoZoom Versa and is well versed in a variety of different recipes.

Maximum Rocket Stove Efficiency: Use a Pot Skirt

 Do you want to maximize efficiency of your EcoZoom rocket stove? Use a pot skirt.

All of our EcoZoom rocket stoves come with a pot skirt.

Pot skirt?

Yes, a pot skirt.

We hear a lot of different names for the circular metal ring that wrap around the outside of cookware: Windscreen, windshield, stove booster, cooking ring, awesomely weird shiny metal circle with knobs…OK, that last one was made up, but you get the point. Everyone has a different name for the pot skirt, but not everyone knows how to properly use it or what it is designed to do.

The almighty pot skirt fastened around a pot prior to using on an EcoZoom stove

Just looking at it, it seems to makes sense. EcoZoom stoves are round and the pot skirt is round. Pots and pans are also most often round…hmmmm…something is cooking here.

Most stove users are used to the windscreen concept of using some sort of material to break the wind from extinguishing the flame source of a stove. This concept makes a lot of sense, except for when you look closer to the design of the rocket stove. The source of heat or fire within a rocket stove is within the lower portion of the combustion chamber of the stove. Placing the pot skirt on top of the cast iron top of the stove doesn’t do much as a windscreen because it isn’t protecting the source of the stove fire.

So how do you use a pot skirt and what does it do?

The pot skirt is meant to be fastened around the base of any pot or pan that it can be secured to prior to placing the cookware on the stove. It should be tightened to fit around the bottom of a pot or pan by squeezing the ring until it is tight and the secured by twisting the screws on the side of the pot skirt. You will know that the pot skirt has been place properly when you can hold a pot or pan in the air and have the pot skirt attached to your cookware without sliding off.

Once you start your EcoZoom stove, simply place the pot or pan on the stove with the pot skirt and cook away. By securely fastening the pot skirt to your cookware it will increase the cooking efficiency of your stove by 20% by forcing heat and gases to not just heat the bottom of the stove but distribute heat up the sides of the pot or pan.

Sometimes the pot skirt won’t fit a pan with handle or excessively large or small pot, but it should fit around most cookware. So go give it a try, wrap that pot skirt on tightly to your cookware and benefit from the increased efficiency you will enjoy from an already super-efficient EcoZoom rocket stove.

About the Author:
Tom Pritchard is an EcoZoom employee and likes to cook outdoors with his EcoZoom stove on camping trips or sunny days. You can email him directly at tom@ecozoomstove.com.

Welsh Mountain Biking with the EcoZoom Versa Rocket Stove

Back in the Autumn our EcoZoom UK Distributor recently took his EcoZoom Versa rocket stove on a mountain bike trip to the damp trails of Wales, spending a few days riding with friends and cooking up warm replenishing meals. If you live in the UK or Europe and are interested in ordering an EcoZoom stove please contact Stewart at ecozoom.uk@btinternet.com.

Wales is the spiritual home of mountain biking in the UK, it has world class, purpose built trails. It’s always a pleasure to get out into those hills for some fresh air and calorie crunching bike action. The trails are remote and it’s possible to park up a few camper vans close by and enjoy some local wilderness at its best.

Welsh weather is a unique and heady mix of sea and mountain influence. Facing the Irish sea, rain features most days and is often torrential. Strong winds can clear the clouds giving the sun a much appreciated cameo part. Autumn is a great time to experience this fresh climate but you have to come prepared.

With this in mind we headed out last weekend into a doubtful weather forecast and I took along my Ecozoom Versa rocket stove to give it a shot amid the gloomy forecast. Mountain biking is a high energy sport and excessive calories are needed to keep you going and to keep warm. This translates into a morning fry up and gallons of tea in preparation for our ride.

We set up the Versa on a log and got a fire going. I’d taken a bit of dry kindling to start the cookstove, but quickly moved on to wind dried sticks out of the damp forest. Bingo! A steady hot blaze got us right up into the mood and a day of swooping singletrack ensued, mightily fueled by an EcoZoom rocket stove.

That evening we were able to pull into a lesser known beach front spot. A stunning place under a full moon but with strong winds due to the exposure. A camp fire was out of the question as the sparks would have gone everywhere, and would have kept us looking for new wood all night.

The Versa on the other hand was in its element. Set up on a camp table between a couple of vans acting as wind breaks, the controlled fire (from bleached driftwood) kept us cooking and warm right through the evening.

With gas camping stoves or spirit burners outdoor cuisine is usually a quick fuel saving boil up of some carbs (eg packet rice), followed by a cup of tea, then bed (to keep warm).

With the EcoZoom Versa cooking style you can be bit more luxurious……. fuel never runs out. You can spend a while in food preparation. We made a delicious green Thai curry using stir fried vegetarian ingredients, and simmered in coconut milk to perfection. Cooking for hours, it gives time for a very leisurely and well deserved beer.

Afterwards I even managed to get a hot water bottle into my sleeping bag…5 star luxury! Thanks to the little packet of heat that is the Versa rocket stove, a real fire can be at hand.

After another EcoZoom breakfast and full day of riding on the Nant Yr Arian trail, I was just about cooked. Fully fed, fueled and fatigued, Wales had worked its mountain bike magic once again.

I’m really happy to commend the EcoZoom Versa rocket stove for its morale boosting support to a great weekend.  As a base camp warmer in a damp, cold place, it’s a winner all the way!

email EcoZoom UK at ecozoom.uk@btinternet.com if you have any great stories of using your Zoom stove out in the wilds.

A British Beach Trip With an EcoZoom Versa Rocket Stove

In crisp, clear autumn weather we were able to get out of town and down to the southern coast of England for a few days of country walks and beach cooking on an EcoZoom Versa Lite.

Our destination was a friend’s seaside caravan near the Dungeness lighthouse – facing Dover’s white cliffs across the bay. We’d suffered our worst storm in years and some areas were still counting the cost with fallen trees and debris in many places. This was the calm after the storm. The weather was perfect for getting out and about. We headed down the board-walk at the beach and set up for breakfast. Our backdrop was the English Channel and the shingle beach which was covered in starfish and sea life thrown up by the storm.

Apart from the beach front scenery and a light quality popular with artists, Dungeness is famous for its nuclear power station. It’s kept safe from storm’s by an artificial shingle bank maintained by tipper trucks. Albert Einstein called nuclear power an ‘expensive and dangerous way to boil water’, fortunately for us we didn’t need any power and could fire up our Versa Lite stove using just driftwood. Cheaply and safely we got the espresso coffee cooked and set up the breakfast bonanza.

The locals don’t touch the shellfish in these parts, but the fresh fish is to die for. We bought freshly caught sea bass fillets from a fishermen and combined them with eggs and bread all cooked on the beach under a solid blue sky. Outdoor cooking at its finest!

On our way back to the sea side caravan park we stopped to look at an interesting piece of low-tech World War II archaeology – ‘the listening ear‘. The concrete ear was designed to tune in the sound of incoming hostile aircraft, of which only two were built before they were superseded by radar.

EcoZoom rocket stoves are a robust, low-tech solution to some of the world’s most pressing problems. Similar to the listening ear, we hope our rocket stove technology supersedes the primitive cooking methods of over 3 billion people in the world.

They also have direct usability here in Britain in all kinds of ways. A caravan by the sea is a home from home for many people in the UK during the warmer months. Most caravans use expensive bottled gas for cooking, and this restricts the options for recipes. Cooking inside a smaller space will create odours and can be uncomfortable on hot days.

The low key ‘footprint’ of the EcoZoom rocket stove is perfectly suited to a pleasant caravan park environment. The contained combustion chamber sends out the right message – that this is a controlled scaled down fire, unlike a campfire which can be hard to control in wind.

Our cooking on the caravan park was fun and allowed for great times outside breathing fresh sea air. It was a couple of days well spent with some great memories, food, and fantastic opportunities for outside cooking – thanks to the EcoZoom Versa.