We spent last year in Spain, visiting eco-projects, thinking a lot about low impact living and travelling by bike. After returning home we are keen to return to the festival circuit, and we have decided to spend this summer working on a project that will enable us to share inspirations from our time in Spain, thus was born ‘The Pedallers Kitchen’. A thoughtfully designed, handmade and efficient kitchen using low impact technology to reduce the amount of energy needed to transport, refrigerate and cook the food that we offer – all pulled by bike!
The Kitchen
Our food is cooked using; A rocket stove (efficient, wood burning, low smoke, made from recycled and scavenged materials), an alcohol stove (made from drinks cans), a hay box oven (or heat retention cooker, where food is slow cooked in an insulated vessel using the heat originally obtained from a short spell on the rocket stove) and an evaporation fridge (a metal box surrounded by absorbent charcoal, which is cooled by water evaporation, using the same principle as sweating). All this will be carried and used in a custom built bike trailer, carefully tailored to our needs and built using almost exclusively reclaimed materials.
During food preparation we will be encouraging inquisitiveness, we will share information about how we are preparing the food, demonstrating the versatility of the underlying principles and how they can be applied to more conventional indoor kitchens and homes.
The Food
Our food is local, with global influences. We take inspiration from peasant food, wild food and street food, you may find us serving; Paella style rice, finished in the hot box with nibbles of Spanish tortilla or a gypsy stew with potato rosti. If appropriate there may even be some flash foraging for juicy blackberries and the like.
We are concerned with food waste, and will be asking local businesses to donate produce which is nearly at the end of its shelf life.
It’s always tea time…
We will be offering hot drinks at various events, including some revitalising home grown herbal teas from Wales, if our hydroponic experiments go well these will be from living plants...
Our Experience
As core members of a DIY, conscious club night during our time at university, we are accustomed to working collectively to create fun and interactive spaces where people can have positive experiences which may lead them to make different lifestyle choices. Since then we have appeared at festivals in many different guises over the years. Two years ago we ran rocket stove making workshops in the Rebel Soul area at Shambala Festival, as associates of our friends V3 Power. It feels like logical progression to now be demonstrating how to use rocket stoves, whilst sharing our enthusiasm for traveling longer distances by bike.
We have appeared at many festivals with the ‘Bugs and Moles Raku Emporium’, running raku pottery workshops. We have also been involved in setting up a food share in which we sourced surplus food as donations from local business in order to serve a free meal to people attending a skillshare.
