The Old Woodstove

by Jeff Walker of Hyde Park, NY

It’s early in the morning in the middle of August. The predawn coolness belies the fact that it will be one of the hottest days of the summer. I’m sure our neighbors must think we are crazy to be splitting wood, but since we cook on a wood-burning cookstove, we need to split wood if we want to eat.

Living with a wood-burning cookstove has its moments. We made the decision in January after we calculated that it was costing us nearly $15 a week to buy natural gas for cooking and hot water. In January, a wood stove always seems like a good idea. In August, maybe not. But in four summers of woodstove cooking we have never felt overheated by the stove. Open windows, shade trees, and a cool basement help us keep the house comfortable.

The decision to put in a cook stove was actually not made quite so lightly. We try to minimize our use of fossil fuels if alternative energy sources can be found. For many energy uses, alternatives are readily available, but cooking is a tough issue. However, we all need to cook, and many of our foods don’t have the same nutrition if they aren’t cooked. Many are certainly less palatable. Solar ovens work well under the right temperature and culinary conditions, but early morning is not the right time or place to make granola in one. Solar electricity may be an option, but resistance heating eats up precious solar-produced watts faster than anything.

We decided to try wood – a renewable resource in our region. With several friends in tree-related businesses, and 10 acres of forest of our own that needed lots of TLC, we reasoned that we could heat our house and hot water, and do our cooking, with waste wood for the foreseeable future, and so far, it has worked out. We have not cut down any live trees in our woods, except invasive species like Ailanthus and red maple that we remove to encourage the native sugar maples, oaks, and hickories. We cut wind thrown trees (at least one big one per year), and help our neighbors cut up their windfalls in exchange for some of the wood. We also help neighbors and friends save a little money by taking the wood from old and diseased trees that they have professionally cut. Six cords of wood fill our wood shed now, almost all of it destined for “disposal” if we had not taken it.

People often say to us, “everyone couldn’t cook with wood,” and that may be true, but everyone needs to look at the alternatives. To generate enough electricity for cooking, especially at the end of the fossil fuel age, will almost certainly encourage the development of nuclear power. However, we don’t feel that it makes sense to split atoms to boil water to turn a generator to produce electricity so that we can boil water. Natural gas may be a possibility, but it will run out. Alcohol might be feasible, but to produce it will mean cutting many more forests to create new monocrop fields of corn.

It may be true that there is no sustainable way currently available to cook food. But the fact remains that a lot of wood is being wasted these days, which could cook food for those who will use it. Wood has the advantage that it does not contribute to global warming because it does not add CO2 to the atmosphere (if you average the contribution over several decades) whereas fossil fuels release CO2 stored over millions of years. Wood also grows well in our region. Without humans, the landscape of the northeast would be almost unbroken forest because trees are so well adapted to the soil and to the climate. Anyone who has tried to maintain an open field will tell you that two or three years of missed grazing or mowing are enough to allow trees to get a start. In fact, many of the woods we see today are only 20 to 30 years old, a result of region-wide abandonment of farmland and consequent expansion of forests. As a stopgap, then, between fossil fuels and some yet-to-be-developed sustainable technology, wood seems like a reasonable alternative to us.

Once we installed our wood stove, we faced several challenges, not the least of which was controlling the heat for cooking. The first night the stove was installed, we built a fire, whipped up a batch of biscuits and then noticed to our dismay that the oven was over 500 degrees F! The biscuits cooked quickly and were great, but we realized then that cooking on a woodstove was going to require more attention than we were accustomed to give it.

As we became familiar with how the cookstove works, however, it became easier to control the temperature although we still have our share of 500-degree (and hotter) ovens. Basically, a cook stove has a small firebox, usually on the left-hand side, and a system of dampers which control how the smoke (and heat) of the fire circulate before reaching the chimney. All the dampers are opened when starting the fire so that a strong draft is setup. Once the fire is established, the chimney damper is closed to keep the heat in the stove, and the firebox damper is used to control the intensity of the fire. An oven damper controls the temperature of the oven and of the cook top. When the temperature of the oven is about 50 degrees below the desired temperature, the oven damper is closed, and the oven will stay close to that temperature as long as the fire is maintained. Once the fire goes out, the oven slowly cools.

The cook top is a versatile feature of a cookstove. Because there are no burners, the whole top can be used. Pans are moved around to find the correct temperature, and long simmering dishes like tomato paste or apple butter or beef stew are easily cooked on the back of the stove top which keeps warm as long as the fire is burning. Cheesemaking is also easy because water for cooking the curds can be easily maintained at the correct temperature depending on where on the stovetop you put the pot.

Cooking on a wood stove is not, however, an exact science. Recipes that call for a 425-degree oven to be quickly lowered to 375 degrees require creative use of the oven damper and the oven door. So far, however, we have not found anything that we couldn’t cook satisfactorily on, or in, the woodstove.

We also heat our hot water with the woodstove. At first, this seemed dangerous since the literature is full of warnings about pressure relief valves, tank capacities, and explosions. However, if pressurized (that is, running) hot water is not your goal, then the solution is simple. Some cookstoves come with a reservoir attached to the stove, which keeps water warm. Our stove did not have that option, so we use a 14- gallon stainless steel canner (which can also process half-gallon jars of juice.) As we learned from an Amish farmer who visited our farm last year, stainless steel is a poor conductor of heat, which means it heats up slowly, but it also cools slowly. Since we have a fire at least once a day, we always have hot water on the stove unless we forget to fill the canner. For cooking and washing dishes this is an easy solution though we need to be careful with dippers of hot water. For bathing, our entire family (8 people) can take baths from one canner of water and still have hot water left for tea. Similarly, we can do all the laundry for the family for a week, including two children in diapers, using no more than two canners of water.

As with so many other things that we are trying, using a wood cookstove requires more planning and awareness than the fossil fuel alternatives. It takes about an hour to get a fire going and to warm the oven. Usually, this is also how long it takes to prepare the raw ingredients for the meal, so the two things can happen at once. We also try to do as much baking and cooking as we can in the morning so that we don’t need to start the fire in the evening, or can build just a small fire to warm things up. Sometimes, though, all of our planning goes awry, or we don’t plan far enough in advance, and it’s then we call the pizza man.