My kitchen kit was extremely low profile but one thing I enjoyed having a lot was a DIY can-stove that I saw on www.tomsbiketrip.com (with the video how to make it).
Light, no-cost, accessible and a mini DIY project – how not to get hooked on it 🙂 Check out the site above for instructions on how to make it as I won’t be repeating what has already been written well.
It really served me well cooking breakfast and dinner and making coffee….only after I managed to get it worked in the field.
The thing is that I got it from my friends and we tested it at home the night before I left. It worked perfectly with even, smooth flames coming out of the stove. I packed it and the next day when I tried to make some tea on the road it failed completely.
It did work at home so the reason was clear – the wind made it more hard for the stove to light up and keep burning. But how to fix it. Little googling presented multiple potential causes – too few holes on the top, fuel, i.e. alcohol, not pure enough, chambers too big, etc.
Apart from making a windshield from whatever I had at hand, I tried to make more openings at the top of the stove. This alone didn’t help. I tweaked the chambers a bit but didn’t have much hope because I was pretty sure they were made correctly.
Last thing was the alcohol. I had 60% medical alcohol that I bought in Holland and nowhere around me I could find a higher percentage medical alcohol at the pharmacies. In Germany I found 70% but that didn’t work any better than 60%. I found my luck in Czechia, in a department store, where they sell technical alcohol and that was it – the stove burned like never before! In fact I think that I had too many holes now, but that was ok – I could finally cook 🙂
It didn’t even have a % on it but it surely was higher and didn’t have any other ingredients like perfume oils which you might have in medical alcohols.
So my advice is to test it in the open, preferably in a windy weather, and do try to get a bottle of good technical alcohol before you set off.