For the love of heat!

H:

Hot water, that all critical ingredient needed for your gourmet trail cooking of pasta, instant rice, instant potatoes, instant hot chocolate, instant coffee, instant oatmeal, or instant soup (which in itself is a category with inexhaustible avenues.  Imagine the simple fact that depending on how much water you put in you can get soup, stew or chowder all from the same basic ingredients, amazing!).

How do you get boiling water on the trail?  As there's no hot water tap that I've ever seen when hiking you end up needing to take along a stove of some kind.  Some folks will burn stick fire on a rock which can work just fine or better and the bonus is that you carry even less gear.  This is illegal in some areas (sure you only get in trouble if you get caught but it's still "illegal").  I won't say that it is more dangerous than an alcohol stove because I've watched some crazy videos on Youtube of people using stoves and making me wonder if they should even be allowed near a toaster (click HERE to go to a video.  Skip to 4 minutes and just wait for it, it will be worth it).  End result, if you're going to stay legal and eat hot food in those particular areas or the trail where there are restrictions then you'll need to carry some sort of stove.

Lightweight backpacking stoves range from the insanely expensive to unbelievably cheap, (down to being free).  They also range from amazing complex to incredibly basic.  A note here is that complexity and price do not always go hand in hand.

The most basic/cheap/tiniest stove you'll find is made from the minuscule Fancy Feast cat food can.  Slightly larger but just as basic & cheap is the humble Bumblebee Tuna can (even cheaper if you buy store brand tuna).  After this you'll find many variations on this style of stove that combine two or more cans of varying sizes to create your heat source and each design comes with differing levels of complexity.

Next up the chain are aluminum soda can stoves or even the extruded aluminum beverage can stoves (like Bud Light and Monster Energy Drink cans).  Actually, a can of soda is often cheaper than a can of tuna but these can get amazingly complex to build!  Wow, the videos I've seen of people making these little rocket fast cook stoves!  Don't have all those tools and the time to make yourself one?  That's okay, you can get one on eBay for $20.

I've watched a few dozen videos reviewing commercially available stoves that you can buy for let's say... oh... $140.  Just as tiny as the aluminum can stove but made out of brass and include lids and pot stands all engineered in Sweden to last a lifetime of hiking.

Let me tell you, I spent much of my day on this lovely Friday writing the last blog post while down a rabbit hole of never ending, auto playing videos on Youtube.  Many of these have compared the commercially available stove to "homemade" versions and there have been burn tests, fuel tests, boil tests, and on and on.

For contrast in making a homemade stove I present to you these two videos.  I don't say that you have to watch both of them in their entirety.  You can skip along or watch them at 1.25 speed like I did.  But they serve as both ends of the spectrum for what I have watched today.

Click HERE for the "simple" video and HERE for the "complex".  Enjoy!