As energy becomes more expensive and scarce worldwide, heating and cooking solutions designed for use in developing nations are becoming more practical for home use in industrial nations. The Vita Goat home cooking and grinding system (provides high efficiency steam boiler heat for alternative cooking, and includes a grinder for processing grain into meal, and a press for extracting liquid from foods and food crops.
As more people grow their own food at home and look for ways to minimize their utility bills, systems like the Vita Goat are becoming more and more popular.
The Vita Goat System was actually invented the United States back in the 1970s, and is currently used in many developing nations to give households and villages the capacity to cook, grind, and process food at an industrial level without the need for factories and cost prohibitive machinery. Essentially a large outdoor pressure cooker, the Vita Goat system burns wood, gas, or a variety of other solid fuels to create pressurized steam. Steam injected at high pressure is up to ten times more efficient for cooking than a wood fire.
The steam inside the Vita Goat is run through a specially designed tube that ‘super heats’ it to temperatures far above that of ordinary steam. The boiler is easy and cheap to make, and best of all, it can be taken apart for cleaning. Steam boilers tend to accumulate scale on their inner tanks, which eventually causes them to fail, but with the Vita Goat, this never needs to happen.
The Vita Goat can pressure cook as much as 15 liters of food in half an hour or less—an astonishing time saver for tasks like canning fruit or processing tomatoes. The food to be cooked is fed into the top of the Vita Goat and then comes out the bottom once it has been processed to the desired consistency. The short cooking time saves energy and using the cooker outdoors keeps the kitchen from becoming unbearable.
The press function on the Vita Goat is easy to use. A filter bag holds the food product to be pressed, the Vita Goat cooks the product, and then a rod is turned that extracts the liquid from the food inside the bag inside the cooker. The practical applications of the press function are endless, but a few obvious ones include pressing cider from apples, grape juice from grapes, and rice milk from rice.
The Vita Goat also includes a pedal powered speed grinder than runs on a system of pulleys and can be used without firing up the cooking function. Practical uses for the grinder include making homemade cornmeal, hot cereals, and soy flour.
The Vita Goat system is a do-it-yourself machine that comes with a variety of spare parts and specialized pieces such as gaskets, gauges, and a bicycle chain and belt. The system is designed to last for at least one year if built as directed.
