From car camping with your family to base camping at the foot of your next serious adventure, you’ll want to have the right gear for the occasion. Below our staff at Switchback Travel breaks down the best camping gear… With a wider cooking area and a trim design, the Kovea is easy to transport without sacrificing cook space. While the L-shaped wind screens on the Pinnable Pro 2 create more space for cookware handles, they fail to provide sufficient wind resistance. With tight windscreens and slightly recessed burners, the Everest 2x delivered unbeatable performance in the wind.
Whether it’s finding great products or discovering helpful advice, we’ll help you get it right . Ideally, the edges would be smoothed and the burrs removed at the factory. So if you have a few tools, you might want to sand down or grind out the sharp corners. The Mountaineer does have an additional-leg kit, but we didn’t find the pieces helpful .
We could typically get about an hour and a half of burn coleman camp stove out of the stove before it filled up with ash and needed to be emptied and re-lit. Not too shabby — that was more than enough time for all the cooking we needed to do. The Coleman Classic’s low price point and durable design made it our Best Value pick. While it doesn’t have the features or performance of our other award winners, it gets the job done.
And because fueled with propane, there isn’t any ashy mess to clean up. Two burners are sufficient for most campers, but aspiring camp chefs or those who typically head out with larger groups might want to step up to a three-burner stove. And like Coleman’s own Cascade 3-in-1 below, the 328 model comes equipped with helpful touches like matchless ignition, intuitive temperature controls, and an integrated wind screen. Eureka’s Ignite Plus is one of the most well-rounded designs on the market with a solid build, good simmer control, and wide, 23-inch cooking area that can accommodate bigger pots and pans.
Note that the pump cup will need to be coated in Pump Lube before use, found as part # 200K2251. Installation is fairly easy, requiring needle-nose pliers, oil, and a flat-head screwdriver, or similar tool, to pry to the spring clip off of the pump. This is the Genuine Manufacturer Sourced replacement check valve that is designed for specific Coleman Lanterns and Stoves.
We wanted to know how fast each stove could bring one liter of water to a boil (203 degrees F at around 4,500′). For stoves with two burners, we also measured the time to bring one liter of water to a boil with both burners on high. The Gas One GS-3000 is a simple, inexpensive single-burner camp stove that really surprised us with its functionality.
Beyond that, if you are someone who enjoys cooking a variety of food at camp — not just packaged oatmeal and burgers — a more versatile camp stove becomes a necessity. When cooking one pancake in the center of our skillet, everything was perfect. But using the edges of a larger pan showed that little burners struggle with heating larger cookware evenly.
If you don’t mind the tradeoffs in opting for this type, the Eureka is an affordable and thoughtfully designed single-burner stove. Other leading one-burner options to consider include Fore Winds’ sleek and rugged Luxe Camp Stove and Snow Peak’s compact Home & Camp Butane Stove . If you’re in the market for a low-fuss freestanding stove, the Outdoorsman is worth checking out.
The high-octane burners are so powerful they were unphased by our wind tests. Beyond this, the stove has removable legs, so it can be used freestanding or on a table. Surprisingly, even with two high-octane burners, the Outdoorsman has good low-end control for simmering and proved to be fairly fuel-efficient (especially when it wasn’t on full blast).