Sunday, April 3, 2011

Soup's On

With my new found freedom close at hand, not only am I hoping to get some bicycle trips in this summer, but also spending some time in the bush.  Multi day kayak trips and such.  One of the ideas we had was to vacuum pack some soup mix to cook up.  I experimented today with how it would work and it is a go.  A bag of Mrs Grass soup will make a half gallon so I decided to divide it to make 2 cup servings.  This brand comes in many different flavors and is mighty tasty. 

This will be year 3 with this stove.  It has gotten a lot of use and works very well for us.  It is not the smallest out there, but I like it because it is very easy to control the heat.  I looked around for a can of pop to give an idea of the size but we didn't have one in the house, so this bottle will have to do. 

It is a MSR DragonFly model.  It weights in at 1.2 lbs and will burn several different types of fuel  We choose to use white gas.  The burn time with this stove running full bore high with the 33oz  fuel tank filled with white gas is 208 minutes.  Running it with kerosene would extend the run time to 253 minutes, but with that comes a loss of the rate at which it heats.  With white gas this stove will boil 1 liter of water in 3.5 minutes, where as kerosene is 3.9 minutes.  Diesel heats at the same rate of white gas, burns longer at 225 minutes for 33oz, but I think the gas is all around cleaner to deal with.

They make 3 different size fuel bottles for the MSR.  The largest is 33 ounces, another at 22oz and yet another at 11oz.  We use the 33 because there are usually two of us.  I may consider getting a smaller one now.

With only two cups of water used to make this soup, it was boiling very quick.

As I said before, it is very easy to control the heat so simmering the soup was easy.  However, I am curious how much fuel this stove burns with it turned down.  I know it is much less, but what I don't know is how much less. 

To me soup taste especially good on cool rainy days, but it never rains when a person spends time in the backwoods...does it?

We took the bag of soup, which we got on sale for $2.49 at a Farm and Fleet store, divided it into 4, wrapped it in a coffee filter and vacuum packed it.
Ready for the pack.

3 comments:

  1. I think I just found the stove i've been looking for, thank you very much!! I like the fact it can burn white gas!! I don't mind the weight, hey I ride a Pugsley..... who cares about an extra 1.5 #'s!! ;))
    Now the test will be to find one for purchase, and do some cold weather testing come winter!! This may sound sick, but it wouldn't bother me if we just skipped the next few months, and got right back to winter!!

    Peace, jms

    ReplyDelete
  2. I sure like the sound of that new found freedom. You know how I feel about bike trips (and there are some in WI I'd like to do), and the kayak trips sound good too.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Vacuum packing is a great idea. You can use the coffee filter as a starter for your warming fire also.

    Diesel fuel is a very energy dense fuel, but I agree with you it would get on everything, and pretty soon your whole pack and clothes would be reaking of the stuff, no matter how clean you are.

    ReplyDelete