Dear Friends
I would like to remind everyone that it is pretty important to a cook to be able to control the fire in some manner. There are lots of precedents so I won’t repeat them. I would like to have a minimum control exerted over the cooking power in order to qualify as a ‘cooking stove’. There are many appliances which are used for heating water, showers (like the Geyser 2000 etc) or drying fish and so one and on. But in order to ‘cook’ the fire has to be controllable. For an electric or gas stove this is fairly easy. In order to start things off, what does everyone think about a turn down ration of 4:1 where the turn down is ‘willful’ meaning it is controlled by the cook be either removing fuel, controlling airflow or by some other means. The reason is that stoves are appearing which definitely burn fuel and provide heat but are not very controllable (or not at all controllable). While one car argue that by brilliantly fuelling the stove in just the right manner a fire and its burn can be exactly matched to a cooking need – agreed this is possible – but is it ‘cooking’? When sitting in the field with cooks it becomes obvious that most cooking involves controlling the power at some point. How much control should be applicable to a stove in order to qualify as a ‘cooking stove’? If I ask for a water heating stove, it would not have to have any controllability at all – it just needs to heat the water within a certain time after which it can go out – no one will mind. But if we want to present a ‘solution’ (a cooking alternative to an open fire or sheltered fire) it will have to be manageable ‘to a certain extent’. Thus if someone says, “Here is my new cooking stove,” I can say, “Prove it can cook.” If I ask for a maximum power of X and ask for a demonstration that it can be controlled to X/4 is that reasonable as a minimum standard of proof? Thanks Crispin
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