Wild Food + Foraging Stove

The Silverfire Scout is a humble little treasure that launched a thousand copycats (many of the tiny mass-produced pack stoves available today are less functional copies of this first-generation model). Designed by our friend Todd Albi (a retired Navy frogman), the Silverfire line of clean-burning, high efficiency, minimal fuel rocket stoves were legendary. Todd’s humble Oregon-based company supplied stoves for global disaster relief programs and infrastructure-limited communities for almost two-decades, then these stoves took off in the U.S. among outdoorspeople. 

We use this ultra-lightweight little steel heat box constantly on the farm and in the field. We use it to cook quick picnic meals when seed collecting, make coffee while scything, and even for melting wax when we are grafting trees in the orchard. It can boil a small teapot in moments, even in cold conditions, with just a handful of foraged twigs as fuel.

Collapsible to about 5-inches in diameter and less than 3-inches tall when collapsed, the Scout uses a sublimely simple air-mixing design to minimize smoke, and it has a protective ash plate to reduce the accidental spillage of hot material from the bottom (a simple feature that is shockingly absent from most knock-offs).

New, in the box, this is some of the last remaining backstock of the first-generation Scout stoves. Use with caution and don’t light fires in dangerous conditions.