Fun Stoves for Outdoor Cooking

From their location on Nairobi's Farasi Lane in Lower Kabete, Cookswell Jikos can make an outdoor stove as playful as a customer chooses.

Teddy Kinyanjui, the sustainability manager of Cookswell Jikos says he sees some of the non-functional outdoor products and wonders why one would pay Sh100,000 for a giraffe if they cannot use it.

“Being a jiko company, we started experimenting with designing jikos that look like frogs, for instance, for the outdoors,” he says.

At Kiboko Camp in Tsavo East, they have made a hippo-shaped jiko. At Sala’s Camp in Maasai Mara, there is a wildebeest stove. And imagine telling guests that ‘there’s a wildebeest cooking dinner for you!’ Another safari lover ordered a Land Rover replica and a dentist wanted one shaped like a tooth.

Theirs is a family business that started in the 1980s. Mr Kinyanjui currently runs it with his mother and two sisters, making everything from charcoal and wood fuelled stoves, portable convection ovens, barbecue grills, kilns and more. The traditional clay oven used vastly in numerous Kenyan homes over the years was actually introduced by his late father, Dr Maxwell Kinyanjui.

“He was hired by the Ministry of Energy to go to Thailand where he studied the energy-efficient bucket stove there and brought that design back to Kenya, adapting it for use in cooking mostly meat and beans. He then went round sharing this knowledge with stove manufacturers here,” Mr Kinyanjui says.

This design became so popular that it has since been adapted in countries like Sierra Leone, Madagascar, Dominican Republic and Haiti. Mr Kinyanjui also says that his father noticed that in various African countries, people were mostly boiling or frying, so he designed a charcoal baking oven that is great for home-baking, small businesses, camps or lodges, nyama choma joints and more, and that’s the company’s flagship product today. It uses very little charcoal.

Nyama choma is at the centres of socialising in Kenya, and even in high-end restaurants in urban centres, wood fired pizza ovens and charcoal grilled steaks are all the rage.

Hotels such as Distant Relatives Eco lodge in Kilifi and Lantana Galu in Diani use traditional ovens to make authentic pizza.

Because the stoves use charcoal and wood, Mr Kinyanjui is conscious of planting more trees.

“We started looking into how we can grow trees in dry areas to make charcoal and would notice these roadside acacia trees that would grow without much care,” he says.

“After much research, it turns out that lorries that deliver building sand unintentionally transport seeds, and the cost-effective and convenient seed balls project came about after many years of doing traditional tree planting. In this method, seeds are distributed in a ball of charcoal dust that can easily get carried about by the wind,” he says.