My Cooking Setup

If you click the picture to the left, you'll go to an album with a few pictures (and even a video) of my sap cooking setup. I built this thing using some of the concepts of a "rocket stove". The main cooker is made of dry stacked fire brick. On top of that, directly in the "chimney" is a steam table pan with a hole in the bottom. Sitting on top of that is another steam table pan. The idea is that the hot gases are forced through the gap between the two pans, allowing for more complete combustion, more efficient use of fuel, and not as much smoke.

The idea worked... sort of. The rocket stove was invented with small branches in mind as a fuel source. I was using nice oak firewood. The oak firewood doesn't have as much surface area as a bunch of small branches would, making it harder to get a good ripping fire going.

I attempted to solve this problem in two ways. First, I had a small fan constantly blowing air under the fire. This was generally sufficient to keep the fire burning well. When it wasn't, I had to resort to the turbo boost. If you look at a larger version of the picture above, you'll see a shop vac hose aimed right at the air intake area of the fire. That hose is connected to the shop vac on the blow side. When the fire wasn't burning hot enough, I hit the switch. It got going in short order.

After it got dark, we took some pictures and video of turbo mode. The pictures with the sparks flying everywhere shows what happens when the turbo mode is engaged after the sap pan has been removed.

By the way, we got about 7 pints of finished syrup last weekend. Not bad for 16 hours of work. Oh, wait...