A stove is completely optional when cooking with ESBIT fuel cubes. I use the top of a small can to avoid burning the ground, but you could just as easily use a small flat stone as a platform. Add in a small wire screen to hold your pot over the flame, a titanium foil windscreen, and a small titanium cook pot and you have an ultralight cooking system without a stove or fuel bottle.
How would you like to eliminate the weight of your backpacking stove and the fuel container (canister, liquid fuel bottle, or alcohol bottle) that you use to carry your cooking fuel on backpacking trips while still being able to boil water and cook meals? What would that save you? Anywhere from 3 to 8 ounces, or even more?
ESBIT is the way to go! These 14 gram solid fuel cubes don’t require a fuel bottle or a stove to use. They’re super reliable, easy to pack, cost-effective (about $0.50 per cube), they have a shelf life of 10 years, and you always know exactly how much fuel you have left.
Each ESBIT cube burns for 13 minutes at 1300 degrees. The average boil time for 500 ml of water is 8 minutes (I usually heat more), making them perfect for rehydrating freeze-dried dinners, dehydrated meals, or freezer bag cooking.
A titanium foil windscreen significantly improves ESBIT cube performance and reduces cook time
More Advantages of ESBIT backpacking fuel:
- ESBIT will burn in very cold temperatures at any altitude since it doesn’t rely on canister pressure
- You can mail ESBIT cubes to yourself in post office resupply boxes
- ESBIT is easy to light
- ESBIT makes a great campfire starter, when broken up into smaller pieces
- You can blow out the unused portion of an ESBIT cube and relight it later
- Very compact to carry
- Only carry the fuel you need, not extra like you do with canister, alcohol, or white gas.
Disadvantages of ESBIT Backpacking Fuel
ESBIT also has a few minor disadvantages, but I feel that these are minor compared to its benefits.
- Leaves a residue on outside of your cook pot, similar to soot from a wood stove
- ESBIT cubes smell like cat piss and are best carried in a ziploc baggie
Complete ESBIT cooking kit including vaseline dipped cotton balls for easy firestarting and three ESBIT cubes for a fast overnight 1 night backpacking trip
Complete ESBIT Cooking Kit
Since switching to ESBIT solid fuel cubes from a collapsible wood stove, I can fit my entire fire starting and cooking kit inside my titanium cook pot which makes packing a breeze. Gear compactness is one of the cornerstones of ultralight backpacking, but it can be difficult to achieve.
My cooking kit consists of:
- Evernew Titanium (Medium-sized) Pasta Pot (110g)
- QiWiz Titanium foil windscreen (16g)
- QiWz wire pot stand (16g)
- QiWiz alcohol stove cap (only) (10g)
- Small snack bag of vaseline dipped cotton balls (consumables)
- Two ESBIT cubes per day (consumables)
- Light My Fire magnesium sparker (26g)
- Mesh bag (16g)
Minus consumables, that puts the total weight of my entire cook system at 194g/(6.85oz). I could easily chop even more weight from this system if I really wanted to, but I’ve owned these components for several years and like my setup as it is.
Still at 6.85 oz., compare the weight of my cook system with the MSR WindBurner Cook System (16.75 oz. not including a gas canister) or the Jetboil Minimo (15.6 oz. not including a gas canister), and you can see how big these weight savings are.
If you want to slash the weight of your cook system without eliminating it altogether, try ESBIT.
Disclosure: QiWiz sent Philip Werner samples of the stove components discussed here about two years ago, but Philip was never under an obligation to review them. This post contains affiliate links which help to fund this website.
from Sectionhiker.com http://ift.tt/2aXJGPy
No comments:
Post a Comment