Cooking Fish Without Stinking Up Your House Cooking fish on the stovetop at home can lead to an oily fish smell that is enough to drive you to the brink of insanity. Either that, or you sleep outside for the night. Don’t worry, EcoZoom is here to help. One night I was coming home from work when I received the following text: “When are you getting home? BTW…it smells pretty strong of fish in the apartment” I didn’t think much of the text and kept on with my walk home from the bus stop. Before I got home I should have thought back to a night in middle school when I attended a school dance. That night my two friends had eaten a fish dinner cooked by one of their parents. Every time they stepped close to me in the gymnasium I could smell the faint stench of dead fish. Before long, one of the friends came up to me and asked if he smelled like fish, paranoid that the oily fish stench from their dinner had latched on to his clothing. I didn’t have it in me at the time to be honest, middle school kids have enough to worry about without wondering if their hair wreaks of cod. So the night went on with my friends walking around with a trail of dead fish behind them for the rest of the night, making it that much harder to ask a girl to dance. Flash forward nearly two decades and I was reliving what my two friends must have experienced that night before the middle school dance. As soon as I opened up the front door to my apartment I was nailed with a punch of rotting fish flesh. Panic immediately ensued. Surely, I thought, this can’t be from simply cooking fish, there must be a dead body in our basement. I ran down into our basement searching high and low for a dead body, dead fish, or dead anything. Nothing. Next I ran upstairs and immediately opened all the windows, turned on any fan I could find, and dug out a bottle of Febreeze.

Cooking fish outside on an EcoZoom stove will save your home from being filled by a nasty fish stench

I went to town with the Febreeze and sprayed it in every nook and cranny. I then texted my roommate and asked if he had cooked fish because the apartment smelled horrible. He said yes and replied saying it was “true cod”, as if that made the smell more tolerable. I tried to deal with the smell and went to bed later in the evening, only to find myself waking up in the middle of the night to re-apply the Febreeze coating I had sprayed earlier. Apparently Febreeze is no match for cod. These two instances taught me one thing: Don’t fry fish inside, and if you are, don’t go out in public afterwards. Nowadays, if I’m going to cook fish in a pan I fire up my EcoZoom rocket stove and take the smell outside. The same can be done with any of your favourite recipes. So next time you are about to fry up some fish, take it outside on an EcoZoom rocket stove. About the Author: Tom Pritchard is an EcoZoom employee and likes to cook outdoors with his EcoZoom stove on camping trips or sunny days. You can email him directly at tom@ecozoomstove.com.