As kitchen appliances continue to adopt 21st-century technology, an incredibly novel new stove has instead decided to embrace a cooking style as old as humanity itself — cooking via a wood-burning fire. Sold by a United Kingdom-based company named Envirolution Stoves, the Kitchen Kamin wood-burning cooker is exactly what it sounds like, an at-home stove which utilizes real wood for heat. This isn’t your typical wood-burning stove of colonial lore, such as the Franklin stove invented by Benjamin Franklin himself, but rather boast the feel of a much more modern stove, coming clad in stainless and enameled steel to boot.
Though the top of a Kitchen Kamin stove looks as typical as anything else you’d see in a kitchen, it’s the unit’s warming compartment that thrusts it into rarified territory. Boasting a dedicated chamber for burning wood, 100 percent of the stove’s heat comes from this area. Unlike traditional stoves which feature temperature gauges capable of adjusting the heat to from low to high, the Kitchen Kamin puts adjustments solely in the hands of the operator, featuring movable levers to control airflow and a chimney for ventilation.
As clever as the wood-burning portion of the stove is, the rest of it works exactly like any stove or oven currently on the market. Its oven counterpart features slidable racks which allow owners complete customization over what they desire to cook — be it a big turkey shot with a blunderbuss or several smaller dishes. The stovetop features French burners which — as expected — receive their heat via the wood-burning firebox. The bottom of the unit features a food-warming compartment as well as a removable ash pan.
There’s no doubt the Kitchen Kamin is a uniquely designed stove but we can’t help but think about how tiresome it’d be to light this thing up each night for dinner. Sure, it comes packed to the gills with a great deal of novelty but will only appeal to cooks who would really enjoy building a fire each night. It’s likely the traditional stove shouldn’t feel too threatened about losing any real estate in the kitchen.