Cooking in the Van vandwellers

So, how do I cook while living in the van?

Mostly, I don’t. Walmart parking lots are usually surrounded by restaurants, ranging from fast-food McD’s and Burger King to more upscale places like Outback or Red Lobster. And Walmart Supercenters always have delis where I can get ready-made sandwiches and other food.

Usually I carry a compact high-calorie lunch with me in my backpack wherever I go for the day, such as cheese, fruit snacks, backpacking gorp, jerky, or sandwiches. Or else I’ll get lunch at a cafeteria or restaurant where I’m visiting. And if I find one, I always make a habit of visiting the all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets or Golden Corrals.

But I also have facilities for cooking in the van.

One option for a van kitchen is a small camper refrigerator, powered either by electricity or by propane. These are often found in Class B camper vans, and provide a place to keep things like frozen dinners or beer. The electric versions require either shore power or a lot of solar-panel and battery capacity. The propane versions run on the same fuel canisters as propane stoves do, though at a much faster rate. Neither option is really practical for me since I don’t really have the space for it, so I have no fridge. I could, if I wanted, use an ordinary portable lunch-box cooler with ice to temporarily store perishable foods like hot dogs or lunch meat, but since I prefer to just buy ready-made food as I use it, I don’t use a cooler either.

Most Class A motorhomes and some Class B campervans also include microwave ovens, which run either from shore power or solar-charged batteries. I did give serious thought to including a small low-wattage microwave oven in my van, for heating up soups and hot dogs and such, but even the smallest microwaves use a lot of electricity, and running one even for just three or four minutes a day would have been way too much for my solar power system to handle without at least a doubling in capacity. So I gave up on the “nuke” idea.

Many van campers use propane-fueled camping stoves that can be found in any sporting goods department. These run off of bottle canisters of compressed propane, about the size of a soda bottle, that connect to the stove using a hose and coupler. These stoves come in one or two burner versions. Some of them even include foldable metal ovens that you can use to bake pies, cakes, or brownies. Anything you can make on a kitchen stove at home, you can make on these camping stoves.

I don’t use these propane stoves, however. Instead, to cook in the van, I have a little alcohol-fueled stove that I have had for years to use while backpacking. (If you are handy, you can make quite good homemade alcohol stoves out of empty soda or beer cans.)

There are many reasons why I prefer to use an alcohol stove rather than a propane camping stove. Alcohol is much safer to use as a fuel in a confined place like a van than propane. Alcohol burns more cleanly and produces less smoke or fumes. If you spill it, it usually just burns off without setting whatever it’s on aflame. Alcohol stoves are also smaller and cheaper to use—propane stoves require canisters, which take up room in the van and are kind of pricey, and also have to be replaced pretty often. And alcohol stoves require no connecting hoses, nothing to hook up or install, and no moving parts to wear out or get lost. Just pour in a half ounce or so of alcohol, light it with a barbecue firestarter, and you’re cooking. My stove will boil a pint or so of water in about ten minutes.

One disadvantage to some alcohol stoves is that, unlike propane stoves, the flame cannot be adjusted—it is always full-on. Other alcohol stoves have a “simmer ring” which is supposed to adjust the flame intensity, but the theory of it often seems a lot better than the actual working of it. Since I run the stove mostly to boil water or to quickly heat up soup in a can, I usually run the stove fullblast. I do need to use the simmer ring when heating up heavy stuff like canned spaghetti or mac’n’cheese, though, since if the bottom of the can heats up too quickly it causes a steam bubble to form, which can then “explode” hot food out the top of the can. If you don’t have a simmer ring, you will have to prevent this by regulating how close you put the can to the flame, until the contents are evenly heated. (And I use a barbecue skewer to poke some holes into the contents to allow steam to escape.)

My alcohol stove uses plain ole ordinary rubbing alcohol as fuel, either the 90% or 70% grade (the 90% burns better), which I can get in any drugstore. In a pinch, the stove will also burn denatured alcohol from a paint store, or ethyl alcohol-based winter engine treatment from the auto parts store, or even the gelled alcohol in hand sanitizers (though that doesn’t burn as well as the liquid alcohol). And in a real emergency, I can burn 151-proof vodka or rum in it.

Using the alcohol stove, I can cook any type of soup or canned pasta, using the can itself as the cooking pot (of course you have to peel off the label first so it doesn’t catch on fire). I can boil water in a pot to make ramen noodles, rice, pasta, or anything else that only requires water. And I can also use heated water to make any of the freeze-dried MRE-type food that is available at any camping store or sporting-goods department.

A bottle of 90% rubbing alcohol costs just a couple bucks, and will last me about a month depending on how much cooking I do.

Submitted August 27, 2016 at 08:07PM by lennyflank http://ift.tt/2bouJAP vandwellers