Cooking and Heat - The Off-Grid Build-Along Video Vault

Build a Fuel-Saving Mud Cookstove

A Ugandan farmer shapes a mud stove for two pots entirely by hand, from soil, water and pipes

13 min

A stove that costs nothing and burns about a third of the wood an open fire eats. A Ugandan farmer builds it entirely by hand, from sifted soil, water and two pipes used as molds, the bigger one rubbed with oil so it pulls out clean.

Everything is measured in hand spans, about 15 cm each, so the build travels to any yard on earth. You carve openings for two saucepans, an internal wall that drives heat to the second pot, and a chimney that carries the smoke out of the kitchen.

Let it dry out of direct sun and rain for a month, two in a cooler climate, and it is ready to cook on.

When fuel is scarce and every meal is cooked off grid, cutting your firewood by two thirds is not a trick. It is margin.

"Build an efficient wood-burning cookstove" by Send a Cow, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Underground Oven: Cook a Feast for Twenty With No Power

Eight steps to an oven made of a hole, hot stones and leaves, where nothing can burn and nothing needs watching

5 min

This is the oldest oven on earth, and it still works when every appliance in your kitchen is dead. You dig it, fire it, load it, bury it, and walk away.

Our edit cuts the build into eight numbered steps, marked on screen: burn a hardwood fire on dry stones for about four hours, rake the fire out, bury the glowing stones under green leaves, stack the food in layers with the meat lowest, and seal it all under wet sacks and a mound of soil.

The cook here closes his oven at eight in the morning and opens it at noon, and it feeds twenty people: fish, pork, chicken, plantains, greens and a coconut pudding. The food steams in its own moisture underground, so there is no flame to manage and nothing can scorch.

Stay for the bonus: roasting a whole breadfruit, or a potato, straight in the embers using nothing but its own skin.

Our edit, combining three CC BY 3.0 sources with new English narration: "Ahi Ma'a - Polynesian earth oven (Moorea)" by Dominique Cathala; "Hangi earth oven - unearthing the food I" and "II" by PorencimadeTc, both via Wikimedia Commons; background music audible in the location sound, "Easy Lemon" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), CC BY 4.0

Cold Start Yogurt from Raw Milk

A homestead kitchen demo of the cold start method, from raw milk to thick Greek style yogurt

14 min

One gallon of milk becomes two weeks of food with nothing but a cup of plain live culture yogurt and steady low heat.

This is the cold start method: no heating the milk to 180 degrees first. Whisk in the starter and hold everything between 108 and 112 degrees for 8 to 24 hours, in an Instant Pot, an oven, a dehydrator or a proofing box, whatever you have.

Strain it through a tea towel and you get thick Greek style yogurt, plus whey worth keeping for soaking grains, sourdough baking, even fermenting chicken feed.

Set aside one cup from each batch as the next starter, and the culture keeps itself going, batch after batch, no store required.

"The easiest way to make yogurt with raw milk" by Little Spoon Farm | Easy Sourdough Recipes, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Build a Solar Oven from Cardboard Boxes

Start to finish build demo using nested boxes, foil, newspaper insulation and cling wrap

28 min

When the power is out, the sun still cooks. This build turns two cardboard boxes into an oven that holds a steady slow cooker heat.

The assembly: nest the boxes, line the inner one with foil over a black bottom, pack the gap with tightly crumpled newspaper, then finish the lid with a foil reflector flap propped on a wire hanger and a cling wrap window to trap the heat.

It can hit 300 degrees and typically holds 200 to 250, so soups, chilies, rolls and even muffins sit out in the sun without burning.

Store bought solar ovens run up to 100 dollars. This one costs next to nothing, because every piece comes from around the house.

License: CC BY-SA 4.0. From the original source. Full attributions on the credits page.

Rocket Stove From a Wood Stove: Burn Half the Firewood

A homesteader cuts his working wood stove apart and welds it into a rocket stove, then tells you the mistake that almost sank it

8 min

A real conversion, welded from scrap in a garage, on a wood stove that was already heating the house and eating a woodpile a winter.

Our edit runs the build in eight steps: cut the top off and keep it, because it becomes the plate the fire hits. Weld in a six inch heat riser with a quarter inch wall, since thin pipe burns through in a season. Sleeve the riser and pack the gap with perlite, six bags, not the three he planned for. Roll the exhaust from sheet steel and cut angled grooves so the intake air spirals.

That spiral is the whole trick: it makes a rocket stove reburn its own smoke instead of caking your chimney with creosote. Then the fix that made it work: the plans called for a three eighths inch exhaust gap, the stove could not breathe, and he cut it apart and rebuilt at three quarters. He tells you exactly why, so you never repeat it.

Welding is required, and a wood stove modification can affect your insurance and local code, so check before you start and fit a carbon monoxide alarm.

We kept the honest ending most build videos cut: it worked, but he went back to running it as an ordinary wood stove, because a rocket stove burns hot and fast and will not hold a fire overnight. He could switch back precisely because he built it reversible, and that is the real lesson of the whole project.

Our edit, re-cut with new English narration from "Rocket Stove From a Wood Stove" by ISREAL CONNECTION, CC BY 3.0, via the Internet Archive