I’m sure everyone has that story of some amazing thing they found at a yard sale or, in this case, on Craig’s list.
Many of you have asked about our stove, and so I wanted to do a quick post.
A bit of back story…
As most of you are aware by now, I love to cook with cast iron. And though many may disagree, cast iron performs best when cooked on an open flame stove (gas or propane). When we first bought this farm, the seller had recently purchased all new LG applicances, including a beautiful LG electric stove with a glass cooktop. I tried using this stove for several months, but I just couldn’t achieve the results I wanted. I began looking at new gas stoves, and most of the nicer ones were starting at $3500 and up. At that time we had just spent several thousand on home repairs and I didn’t want to spend the money on new stove at the time. So I gave my husband a mission. I said to him, “Find me a good, used gas stove. I don’t care if it matches the other applicances, I don’t even care what it looks like, I just don’t want to pay thousands of dollars.”
So about a week later he messages me and says, “I think I found you a stove. I’m going to send you a picture but don’t get scared when you see it. It’s been sitting in a storage unit for years and it’s all dusty, but the lady who has it for sale used it to run a commercial kitchen for years. It’s at least 30 years old, maybe 35.”
So he sends me a picture of this rough, and I mean ROUGH looking stove lol. I replied back, “Yep it looks rough, but I trust you can make it beautiful again.”
And so we drove to pick this thing up and, if memory serves me correctly, we got it for $350 
. My husband brought it home, soaked it down from top to bottom with degreaser, and power washed the whole thing. Now many of you may be thinking, “He POWER washed it? Aren’t you worried about the electrical components getting damaged?” You see, another great thing about this stove is that it is 100% mechanical, there are zero electrical components. There have been times that I have been in the middle of a canning cycle and the electric has gone out for one reason or other. My stove just keeps on truckin’ because it runs 100% on gas. And with our off-grid lifestyle, this is awesome!
So here is the stove that you all see me cook on in our posts. It is a 30+ year old Vulcan, 36”, 6-burner, gas stove. And I love it! I wouldn’t trade it for any of the brand new, fancy stoves on the market today. We run a cottage food bakery and I can fit (2) full size sheet pans in the oven, and run 6 large cast iron pans, all at the same time. It’s a BEAST!
The pictures below were taken at different times. The first picture shows the stove with a vent hood overtop. This is a fairly new thing. I also included a picture showing BOTH of my 41-quart All-American pressure canners sitting on the stove at the same time and I still have room to cook on the other burners.