Boiling Water With Just a Knife

A metal cooking container is easy to take for granted. I set out with the goal of boiling water using nothing but a knife. I had a rough idea of how I wanted to accomplish this, but had to make some adjustments along the way.

I have seen several demonstrations and designs for bark containers that will hold water and initially intended to make a variation of a canoe bailer that was used by the indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest; and press that into service as a stone boiling container. These are traditionally made from the bark of the western red cedar, but I chose to use big leaf maple because I didn’t want to contaminate the water with the oils in the cedar bark. Native people in this area boiled water in wooden boxes made from bent planks of western red cedar, but I wasn’t sure if it would be advisable to drink water boiled in the bark of that species.

Things didn’t go exactly as planned, but I learned some lessons and ended up with something of a hybrid design, incorporating folded and pinned corners with a rigid center section. Because the outer bark was not removed from the center section, it made for a very sturdy container that held water and could be easily picked up and moved around.

Dropping hot rocks into the water resulted in an almost immediate boil and surprisingly clear water. I let it sit long enough to cool and was able to drink directly from the corner of the container.

The most surprising thing to me was how little flavor the bark imparted to the water. It definitely tasted a little bit like the smell of fresh bark but it was mild. I imagine this could be different with bark from a more pungent species.

After the stone boiling experiment, I was curious how the container would fare when put directly on the coals, wonder if it would boil water similar to a paper cup in the fire. While it did eventually boil, it took almost a half hour and the heat transferred a lot more of the tannins in the bark into the water. Of course it also ended up full of ash and the heat basically destroyed the vessel.

Stone boiling is the way to go if you have access to rocks, but it is nice to know that it is still possible to boil water without them.

I didn’t want to pour out water that I had spent so much time tending, but the idea of waiting around to drink an ashy slurry of orange water didn’t sound appealing either, so I took the opportunity to do some cooking with it instead.

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A Note on The Use of a Living Tree

While I certainly didn’t do this young maple any favors, I felt that this was an appropriate harvest. I chose a young tree with some existing damage growing on the edge of a river floodplain. After extinguishing the fire, I went back and cut the stump down cleanly with a saw, and the stump will likely be sending up new shoots.

Maples are very hardy and usually regenerate after being cut. I am not sure if the tree will survive long term, but respectfully harvesting living trees has been a part of human history for as long as we have been humans.

Whether or not this is appropriate depends on a number of factors including species, location, and regulations, so it is important to do your homework and some thinking about the local ecology before harvesting any living plants.

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Questions, comments, and suggestions are always welcome and appreciated.

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Materials Used

Knife: Modified Tops Tom Brown Tracker (on loan from a friend)

Bark Container & Bow Drill Cordage: Big Leaf Maple (Acer macrophyllum)

Bow Drill Set: Grand Fir (Abies grandis)
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Music

Jebase – Relax
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiMHMhqUDYo

Ikson – Relfect
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A26LDRmLP58

Luca Stricagnoli – The Last of the Mohicans (Guitar)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Kbv1OpIpaA

YOU BLEW IT!!!!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5RtlpXsl8k