The cooking system comprises:
- a stainless steel pot with lid;
- "penny" type DIY stove;
- bent wire pot stand;
- heatshield made from aluminium baking tray;
- one or more 125ml nalgene bottles filled with methylated spirits;
- lighter/matches
Total weight of system is 467g including one full bottle of methylated spirits (123g/125ml of metho). In comparison, my MSR whisperlite weights almost 500g just for the stove (no fuel, no pot).
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The heart of this system is the home made aluminium "penny" can stove. Based on a design by Mark Jurey it is ultra-lightweight (12g) and fairly efficient.
I've built many versions of this stove and the latest variant uses larger cans - 700ml cans of some putrid undrinkable energy drink. The 700ml cans make for a larger stove than ordinary soft-drink cans. This version is more stable and slightly more efficient when used with the wide based pan as the heating jets are spread over a slightly wider area. Half a litre of room temperature water comes to the boil in around 3 minutes.
Everything packs away within the pot. There's enough room for a second 125ml nalgene bottle.
To boil 500ml of water you need about 20ml of metho. I use about 60ml of metho per day. This gives me about 1.5 litres of boiling water - enough for two cups of water for tea/coffee/soup and a litre of water for rehydrating/cooking.
I'm not precious about my cooking pot, and being stainless steel its pretty tough. Whenever I can, I save fuel using fires to cook and boil water. A fire is the ultimate lightweight cooking system.
Improvements
There's always room for improvement. At some stage I'd like to replace my current pot with a lighter weight titanium version that has a lid that also serve double duty as a frypan or plate. The lid of my current pot only works as a lid. If I had a pot whose lid works as a plate/frypan it would mean that I can leave my plate at home and further save some weight.
I've now replaced the stainless pot with a great Ti pot from alpkit - see here for version 2 of my ultralightweight cooking system .