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OFF GRID WILDERNESS LIVING – ALONE // DIY Wood Fired CHINESE WOK STOVE

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Two homesteaders in the British Columbia rainforest just built a stove that runs on nothing but fire and wood.

Episode 96 of Jake and Nicolle’s off-grid series finds the couple finishing a job that’s been months in the making: a homemade, wood-fired Chinese wok stove built entirely to cook without a single watt of grid power or a drop of utility gas. The project sits at the heart of their homestead, Komorebi, tucked into the coastal rainforest of British Columbia alongside their Pacific yurt. The episode follows the stove from final construction through its first fire to its first meal.

• Jake and Nicolle complete and fire-test a homemade wood-fired Chinese wok stove at their off-grid homestead, Komorebi, in coastal British Columbia.
• The stove runs on alder, described as the property’s most abundant renewable resource, cut and burned specifically for high-heat wok cooking.
• The inaugural meal cooked over the new stove is a stir-fry and egg fried rice made with vegetables harvested directly from their own garden.

The Modern Rise of Wok Stoves

For Jake and Nicolle, the wok stove isn’t a novelty build — it’s a functional answer to a problem every off-grid cook eventually runs into: how do you get restaurant-level heat with no propane tank and no power line? A traditional wok setup depends on a blast of concentrated heat from underneath the pan, something electric coil stoves and even most camp burners can’t replicate. A wood firebox positioned directly beneath a wok ring solves that, and it does it using the one resource Komorebi has in surplus.

That resource is alder. The homesteaders describe it as their fastest-growing, most renewable material on the property, and in this episode it pulls triple duty — fuel for the stove, material they’ve also earmarked for furniture and smoking food. Building a stove specifically engineered to burn it efficiently is as much about resource management as it is about dinner.

The Build and the First Fire

The episode picks up at the finishing stage of construction, closing out a build that’s centered on a combustion chamber designed to channel heat straight up into the wok ring rather than letting it dissipate. Once the last pieces are in place, Jake and Nicolle light the stove’s first-ever fire inside the firebox — the moment the whole build has been working toward.

No electricity, no gas hookup — just alder wood and a flame they lit themselves, cooking dinner off a stove they built with their own hands.

Watching a fire take hold in a stove you welded and stacked yourself is a different kind of payoff than flipping a switch, and that’s the note this segment of the episode hits hardest. The couple isn’t just testing whether the stove works — they’re testing whether months of off-grid problem-solving actually holds up under real flame and real heat.

Garden to Wok

With the fire established, the episode moves straight into the reward: the first meal cooked on the new stove. Jake and Nicolle harvest vegetables straight from their own garden and turn them into a stir-fry, paired with egg fried rice cooked over the open flame. It’s a full-circle moment for a homestead built around growing and foraging as much of their own food as possible, similar in spirit to the produce-driven cooking featured in How To Turn Your Lawn Into A Vegetable Garden.

The meal itself is simple by design — a stir-fry and fried rice are exactly the kind of high-heat, fast-cooking dishes a wok stove is built for, and cooking them over open flame in the middle of the rainforest is as much a test of the stove’s practicality as it is a celebration. It’s the same off-grid cooking instinct on display in Lemon Crunchy Chicken cooked in the middle of the forest, where the forest itself becomes the kitchen.

Building Komorebi Piece by Piece

The wok stove is only the latest fixture at Komorebi, a homestead built structure by structure the way many off-grid projects take shape — the Pacific yurt first, then garden beds, and now a purpose-built cooking setup that runs entirely on wood the property grows itself. It’s the same incremental, hands-on approach documented in builds like Building an Off Grid Woodworking Workshop Log Cabin in the Forest, where every new structure adds another layer of self-sufficiency.

What Episode 96 really captures is the moment a homestead stops being a work-in-progress and starts producing something you can eat off it. The wok stove is finished, the alder supply is doing exactly what it was planned to do, and Jake and Nicolle now have a way to cook high-heat meals indefinitely without ever plugging into a grid that doesn’t reach Komorebi anyway.