Cooking with pine resin

Just a quick follow-up to my January 29th post Pine Resin...a natural glue and aid to firemaking . I wanted to post up some pics of using pine resin as a fuel to make a meal. I used the metal tin that I'd collected pine resin in and melted into a cake. In this photo you can see the flame is intense and comes right out of the tin:

Pine resin fuel for boiling water

 

Using pine resin, I achieved a rolling boil on a cup and a half of water in about 20 minutes, which I think is about the same as 2 ESBIT tablets, but free of course. Initially, I used the burner ring from a Swiss Army M71 gel fuel stove. However the burner sunk into the melted resin, and the pot's bottom smothered the flame. I had better success using a grill crafted by my good friend Dan, who runs a small home-based business making tactical kydex sheaths and bushcrafting gear:

Pack size grill holds pot above fire.

 

The down side is that it is much more sooty than the Swiss stove [quite sooty in itself] and very hard to remove from the cookpot because it is resinous in nature. I get the same result cooking in a campfire, as resins from the burning wood gather on the cookware.

The fire is out, but the molten resin is still bubbling:

Molten resin stays hot for a long time

 

It took quite a while for the tin to cool adequately to allow handling. Afterwards, the resin forms a solid cake in the tin and is ready for re-use. Free stove fuel, and a hot breakfast, courtesy of Mother Nature:

 Resin soot blackens cookpot

 

 

 

 

 

 

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