The Quest to Find the Best Camp Stove
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When I was a kid and my family would go camping, like everyone else we'd take along a standard green Coleman stove. With two burners, it folds up and carries like dad's briefcase. I loved the sound it made on ignition, lit propane humming with the rushing pink noise of a waterfall crashing into a swimming hole.
Twenty years on, I have my own camp stove: Green, Coleman, two-burner. Shouldn't there be a better model by now? This season, as I planned a trip to the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, I decided to try to find cookers doing something different. That's how my girlfriend and I ended up going into the woods for the weekend with a plan to cook five meals for two people with six stoves.
Here we go.
Friday Night
The night we arrived at Brendan T. Byrne State Forest in central New Jersey, we set up the Camp Chef Mountaineer ($230), an aluminum big brother to my trusty Coleman.
They're both briefcase-style two-burners, but the Mountaineer has roughly twice the heating capacity and 1.5 times the cooking surface, but being aluminum, it's less than twice the weight. It's also designed to hook up to a 20 lb. propane tank, so it can be home base for a long trip with lots of people.
I used the fitting from my normal stove to attach it to a typical 1 lb. canister, and it was more than capable of cooking my favorite cheap, easy, late-arrival camp meal, diced hot dogs in pork and beans. Yum.
Saturday Morning
Waking up in the morning at any camp, I want three things: bacon, pancakes, and hot coffee. The Eureka! Gonzo Grill ($140-$190) doesn't seem like it ought to be particularly good at handling any of those things.
A squat green orb, it's got exactly one 6,000 BTU burner and looks like a typical camp stove got friendly with a Baby Weber barbecue. But its genius lies in its adaptability. It has a metal grate over the burner, and on top of that is a removable cast iron disc—smooth on one side and striped on the other. In other words, it's a stove, griddle, and grill.
I used the flat side to cook bacon and then hotcakes. And the coffee? Eureka! is owned by the same company that owns JetBoil, and with the grill's JetLink port you can daisy chain a superfast burner (not included) to run off the same propane tank. Perfect for heating up my percolator.
Saturday Afternoon
One of the more intriguing cookers I found was the GoSun Grill ($800), which is actually an oven. It's shaped like a longhouse. Open it up, and two shiny wings—reflectors—concentrate sunlight onto a central vacuum tube made of borosilicate glass. Put food on the tray that slides in and out of the center of the tube, and orient it towards the sun. The food gets very hot.
Unfortunately, while GoSun says you can cook—albeit slowly—even if it's overcast, precipitation is a no-go. Our lunch was called on account of rain.
Saturday Night
Saturday night was a dinner of extravagance, and we needed a grill up for the job. Steaks, salad, and mac and cheese from scratch. For the steak and mac we decided to use the Trager PTG+ ($300), a portable electric smoker. It's maybe a stretch to call it a camp stove, but it easily fits in the trunk of a car, and at 41 pounds, it is carryable (short distances), and with a power inverter (not included), you can run it off a car battery.
The catch for something like mac and cheese is that you still need a separate stove for stuff like making the sauce and cooking the pasta. So while I got the Traeger hot and loaded with wood pellets, my girlfriend handled those tasks with the Primus Onja ($140), a grill that tries to rethink camp stove design.
When closed it's still a briefcase, but it hinges in the middle like scissors. Its two burners are on top, and the wider bottom forms the base (fuel canisters tuck underneath). This minimizes the stove's footprint while at the same time allowing for the use of large pots, since there's no lid to constrain the space.
It's quite clever, as is the wooden grill cover that doubles as a cutting board, and at 7 lbs., it's incredibly light for its capacity. The only trouble was keeping it lit during what became a pretty windy evening. Turns out a classic camp stove's lid isn't just a cramp on space—it's also a wind shield.
The wind also seemed to give the Traeger problems, as smoking requires the pellets to burn pretty low. We had to re-light them on a couple occasions, but it was worth it. The mac and cheese had extra umami from the smoke, and the steak was one of the best I've ever had.
The next morning before packing up camp, we cooked up leftovers into a breakfast scramble. I used the Mountaineer again. The grill was so big and the burners so hot I discovered I could just have two pans going and nestle the percolator in between.
Many weeks later
Leaving the Pine Barrens, I was disappointed we hadn't gotten the chance to try the GoSun Grill because of rain. Since there's no open flame, you don't have to constantly tend to it; I liked the idea of loading it up, going for a hike, then coming back to dinner. So the next weekend, we decided to test it in a park near my house. It rained. The following weekend, too. After several delays, we finally got outside an overcast but dry day with the sun high in the sky.
This turned out to be a mistake. Cooking took so long that by the time the sun dropped too low to hit the reflectors we had only modestly warm filling and doughy crusts. It's fair to say that's our mistake, but then, so much of the fun of camping is making do with whatever landscape and weather you get.
In a test that included a 40-pound electric smoker, the solar oven turned out to be the device least suited for camping. At least in the protean weather of the Northeast. Maybe next year I'll camp the Sun Belt.
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