Summer Kitchen

A summer kitchen is a cooking space built outside the house, standing alone or attached to one wall, and used through the hottest part of the year. An oven or stovetop is the largest heat source most households bring indoors, and in hot weather whatever keeps the house cool has to carry that heat out again. Cooking outdoors removes the load instead of fighting it.

Where the cooking is wood-fired the building does a second, larger job. Burning wood indoors without a flue can lift fine particles in kitchen air to ten or a hundred times the long-term level the World Health Organization recommends, and a chimney or hood reduces that without ending it. A separate building removes the exposure rather than trimming it. Preserving decides how it is fitted out. Water bath canning, which holds filled jars in boiling water, moves outdoors on any portable burner. Pressure canning wants an electric coil of at least 1500 watts or a cast-iron element, and caps gas at about 3.5 kW (12000 BTU per hour), above which the canner heats too fast and can warp. Without an electric circuit that work goes back indoors in the hottest weeks.

A roof over a cooking fire is, structurally, a porch with a grill under it, so the clearances are the design: height above the cooking surface, a surround of material that will not burn, about a metre (three feet) of clear ground, and walls open enough that heat and carbon monoxide leave rather than gather. Grease left on the surfaces can ignite, so cleaning after each use is unavoidable. Give it a sink and a drain or the washing walks back to the house it was meant to relieve, and store the equipment out of season, or an idle open structure leaves it to weather, rodents and theft. It pairs with an indoor preserving room that takes the pressure canning, a garden or food forest supplying what gets cooked, and a solar dehydrator that preserves without adding heat.