Abstract
The assessment of cooking system performance in
developing countries is a continued area of interest,
with laboratory testing methods often being
unrepresentative of real world use, and field based
methods tending to be resource intensive with high
levels of variability. This paper presents the
Uncontrolled Cook Test (UCT), a relatively low cost
field testing protocol that assesses the task-based
performance of the system when cooking any meal
and operated as per local conditions and practice. A
total of 29 UCTs were conducted in households in a
study village in rural northern Mozambique, all on
wood-burning three stone fires. The UCT proved a
capable method for the assessment of cooking system
performance and, critically, returned a data set with
less variation than is typically reported by existing
field test methods, so offering the potential to use
fewer resources to detect a statistically significant
difference between baseline and ‘improved’ stove
results.