Digital Friend's video: How-to Cook Using A Dutch Oven A Steel Bucket 2 Screwdrivers And A Wood Gas Stove Tutorial

Watch me cook using a Dutch oven, a bucket, a wood gas stove and two screwdrivers. This outdoor cooking technique is highly efficient, smokeless and can work in moderately windy and rainy conditions. If a proper heat shield is used, the stove should be able to sit on wood without burning. The technique is also relatively safe and stealthy, because the flame is surrounded by metal. My favourite fuel is wood pellets, but it’s also possible to cook using twigs. Watch me manage the stove and you’ll learn lots of techniques to make the cooking process more efficient. Safety Suggestions: I always wear safety glasses and leather welding gloves when I work with the stoves. The stove is set up far away from anything flammable. Be sure to have a fire extinguisher or some water on hand if the fire needs to be extinguished. If you decide to place the stove on a picnic table, remember that it must have a heat shield (gravel) in the bottom of the pail. Test your pail on scrap wood to make sure that it doesn’t burn the wood. Without the gravel, the pail bottom gets really hot and will burn wood underneath it. I would be careful about putting the pail on a painted picnic table unless you’ve tested it, because heat peels paint. Be careful when you lift the heavy Dutch oven. Carry the Dutch oven away from your body in case it spills or accidentally falls. I always wear leather welding gloves when handling hot metal. Materials I use a steel bucket. The Dutch oven should fit into the bucket. I use high temperature spray paint to paint the outside of the bucket. This makes the bucket look better and work stealthier. It is possible to substitute steel rods, rebar, steel pipes (etcetera) for the long shank screwdrivers. Use what you’ve got available and find a creative solution. Remember, the metal will get hot because it is being touched by the flame. Don’t burn yourself. I like to wear leather welding gloves as a safety precaution. I like to use small round gravel but any type of small gravel will work. Heat Shield I recommend placing about 1 inch of gravel at the bottom of the bucket. Use more gravel if an inch isn’t enough. The purpose of the gravel is also to raise the top of the wood gas stove about a thumbs breath beneath the screwdrivers. Making The Bucket I use a permanent marker to mark the holes. Then I use a small metal drill to drill a hole on each permanent marker mark. I then use a bigger drill or a step drill to drill through the little holes. You can always make a hole bigger, but you can’t make it smaller, so drill using smaller bits and then switch to progressively bigger bits. This bucket is really just a spray-painted bucket with bunch of holes in the sides, some gravel in the bottom and two screwdrivers stuck through the side. It’s very simple. Physics Of the Bucket A flame needs fuel + heat + oxygen. When wood gets hot, it produces a gas which can be burned by the stove. Hot air rises. Stoves need lots of oxygen to burn well. The cold oxygen rich air is sucked into the bucket through the bottom ventilation holes and moves upwards towards the flame, because hot air is less dense than cold air. A flame sucks air. The ventilation holes need to be near the bottom of the pail close to the gravel. The flame burns the oxygen and produces heat. The flame needs to have a little gap between the top of the stove and the bottom of the Dutch oven. The heat from the flame is transferred to the cast iron Dutch oven. The cast iron is thick and sort of diffuses the heat. The water in the bottom of the Dutch oven further diffuses the heat and produces steam, which fills the entire Dutch oven with relatively even heat. The hot exhaust from the flame (basically CO2) is forced up between the side of the Dutch oven and the side of the pail, to further transfer heat to the Dutch oven. If somethings pills or rain runs down the sides of the Dutch oven, it will drain out the bottom of the pail. The Dutch oven shields the flame from the rain. The side of the pail shields the flame from the wind. The pail also acts as a stand for the Dutch oven and hides and protects the flame. Twigs and scrap wood can constantly be fed into the wood gas stove. If you are using wood pellets, the pellets have to almost completely burn out before you add new pellets. Adding fresh wood pellets to a burning wood pellets will usually suffocate the flame by depriving it of oxygen. This is why it’s sometimes good to have two buckets, so you get the second bucket burning before the first bucket dies down, which allows long uninterrupted cooking times. Light the wood pellets using the petroleum jelly coated cotton balls. The stove is hottest when you see a big flame with lines in the flame running upwards. Each fuel has a burn time, say it takes 4 minutes to light the pellets flowed by 35 minutes of high heat (big flame) flowed by 30 minutes of low heat (the coals). Use a stopwatch and time your burn cycle.