My Apartment Patio Tiny Outdoor Kitchen

It’s finally starting to feel like spring! With the weather warming up but COVID-19 stay-at-home extending into a third month, we’re all starting to go a little stir-crazy. This year we’re seizing the opportunity to focus our attentions a little closer to home, namely upgrading our neglected apartment patio to include a tiny outdoor “kitchen” in literally 2 sq ft of space.

With our better outdoor space, we actually get to use our patio to get some much-needed sunshine and Vitamin D — and still maintain safe social distancing. We’re growing a tiny “victory garden” of container veggies, enjoying afternoon drinks on the patio, and eating outside as much as humanly possible. Our cat, Meatball, is loving sunning outside while we’re using the patio too!

For me, the best part of warmer months is cooking and eating alfresco (bbq! campfire s’mores! cumin lamb skewers on the grill!). So we found a way to cook outside on the patio in our city high-rise apartment. There aren’t a lot of parts involved, and everything turned out so perfectly that I just had to share.

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Our Outdoor Kitchen Base

I promised outdoor cooking with a tiny footprint, and since this is an apartment outdoor kitchen, multi-tasking is a must. Our tiny outdoor kitchen is on wheels, in the form of a Ikea Nissafors kitchen/bar cart ($25 well-spent). It takes up only 1.62 sq ft of balcony floor space, and the three tiers are perfect for storing everything we need to cook outside.

This Nissafors cart is really versatile, so we’ll be bringing it inside to use as a bar cart or kitchen storage during the winter. For now, we’re living not-so-large on our little apartment patio.

Protection from the elements

An Induction Cooktop

Of course, this wouldn’t be much of a tiny outdoor kitchen without a heat source. Since we’re not allowed to have grills on our tiny apartment balcony, we’ve repurposed my favorite induction cooktop from the kitchen. You’ll need an outlet on your patio or an extension cable from inside.

What is induction anyway?

Induction cooktops use electromagnetic induction rather instead of thermal induction in traditional (gas or electric) cooktops. In Chinese, induction cooktop is 电磁炉 (diàn cí lú).

If you’ve ever been to a hotpot restaurant, you’ve used an induction cooktop to keep your hotpot soup boiling. When winter rolls around, use your induction cooktop to have a hotpot party! I’ll write a piece on how to eat hotpot at home when winter hotpot season rolls around again.

The benefit of induction is energy efficiency in a compact footprint. Because the magnetic field creates heat directly in the pan, there is less loss of energy compared to thermal induction. The cooking surface is also cool to the touch (except residual heat from the pan) — great for safety around kids and counter-surfing cats.

Induction Cookware

The only real downside is that this magnetic field requires your pan to be magnetic. Cast iron (both enameled and bare), carbon steel, and 18/10 stainless steel pans (including tri-ply clad) are always induction-friendly. Test out your cookware for induction compatibility by seeing if an ordinary kitchen magnet sticks to the bottom: if it does, you’re good to go. Here are a few of my personal favorites:

A Small Worktop

To make the top tier of the Nissafors cart a bit more cooking-friendly, we got an Ikea Proppmatt cutting board. It’s a bit smaller and thinner than the top shelf of the cart. However, for small outdoor prep like cutting fruit it’s been perfect for us. There’s also a slightly larger Proppmatt that would also fit. Please be careful with this setup, as the Nissafors cart does not have locking wheels.

How are you bringing the outside in?

Share your outdoor cooking setup! Leave a comment down below or share on Instagram with hashtag #thericelover