It has its advantages, in that you can open the burner without lighting it immediately and not gas the place out. You don’t need a gas detector or blower in the bilge. The risk of explosion is far less. There’s no need to have an externally-vented locker for gas bottles or pipe-lines and regulators.
However, there are a few disadvantages: cooking times are slightly longer, the bottoms of the kettle and pots get blackened, and perhaps greatest of all, meths is not always so easy to come by.
In each country it is called something different, from “denatured alcohol” to “spirit” (pronounced “shpirit” – which may be confused with the drinking kind), to “alcool” to other indecipherable Greek names, which can only be translated via Google. All very confusing!
We had a few trial and errors, with various store-keepers convincing us that “lamp oil” was used for cooking – only to find it to be kerosene.
The stove and oven burners have round stainless steel pots underneath them, which hold about a litre of meths each. They are opened and closed by a simple mechanism of a thin metal plate that slides across an opening. It is important to flick this plate back open again after having closed it, to make sure the flame is totally extinguished and not still burning in the pot below. A litre is supposed to be good for about 4 hours of cooking, but in fact lasts a lot less.
In every port we visited, one of the first tasks was to find a shop selling meths. Chandleries rarely stocked it, and finding a hardware store in tourist towns wasn’t always easy. Sometimes pharmacies stocked it, but in small quantities and at great expense.
In Split, we found a paint shop that had a dozen one litre bottles on the shelf, and we bought the lot. Each bottle cost around 5 – 6 Euro, so certainly not a very economical way of cooking.
We may look into converting to gas next year.
No comments:
Post a Comment