How to Make a Camping Stove

Video Transcript

"I'm Charlie, your outdoor expert. So you want to know how to make a camping cook stove? Well I'm here to tell you how. Most people when they go camping will build a fire, maybe arrange some bricks across and lay it a grate across and cook on top of that. Or, if you've got a little grill you can take that with you too. But it's not an oven. What you want to do is most things have to cook inside of an oven. So first things first, what you do, is you go get you a cardboard box. Go down to your local grocery store or whatever store that has boxes and just ask for one. But usually they'll just be willing to give them to you for free because they're going to throw them out anyway. Now what you do, is just tape the box up together until you get a nice box shape, alright? Once you've got the box taped together. Now on this particular box, the openings, the flaps are out here. What I did, is I took a razor blade and I cut a door right here. Now once you've got your box and your door situated, you go back and you take the heavy duty aluminum foil and you wrap all around the outside and the inside of the box. You just take a piece out, cut it like so and stick it inside. Now, you want to make sure that you cover all the exposed areas of cardboard because it's going to get really hot inside and you don't really want the thing to burn on you. After you've got your box all situated with your heavy duty aluminum foil all over it, next thing you want to do is prepare your charcoal. Now the way you want to do this is arrange your charcoal in kind of a pyramid fashion. Now some of them are already, ready to go just throw a match or whatever on there to make them blaze up. But you might need some assistance with lighter fluid. So make sure you got that too. Now once you got the coals burning, usually most people think that, 'Oh the coal has got a flame on it, it's good to go'. That's not true, you want your coals to get nice and white. When they're white, that's when they're at their hottest peak. So what you do is you can either just take a shovel but first you want to make sure that the box here isn't propped up on a cooler because your cooler will melt. You want to make sure it's sitting directly on the ground. And either some people, there's different ways to do it, some people will take the coals and just line them across the bottom. Now that's good and safe, I mean that's good but it's not going to let your box last because you're only going to be able to use this thing about two or three times if you do that. Another good way to do it, is get you a container. Just slide the container in there and put your coals inside of the container. Now this particular one is got to stand there that I can use to put this grate on top of. And all you do is just take whatever baked goods you want, put it on top there, close the lid and just let it sit there and cook. Now you want to keep in mind that heat inside of the box might not be the same temperature heat time ratio that's written on the instructions on the box of whatever baked goods you're trying to do. It's all about trial and error. Just want to make sure you keep checking just to make sure you get it to where it's supposed to be. And that's how you make a box oven for camping."