Cooking on an outdoor fire or a woodstove is a luxurious process, but not always what we need here for a quick cup of tea or for getting something to eat onto the table quickly after a long day out. So to supplement the stove in the kitchen we have a set of gas stoves, ranging from a small hiking stove to a large standalone campingaz setup I don't intend to use until its warm enough to set up an outdoor kitchen. In this review I'm going to introduce the smallest stove, which does just fine for boiling water or heating a frying pan. It's in daily use at the moment, starting first thing every day with a pot of coffee.
I bought the stove last year for a cycling trip and its not marked with any branding, but I've found it for sale online here. It's more efficient than my larger (and more stable) 'truckers' model from my van days. For camping and cycling trips it's ideal because it folds up small in its own little plastic box and can take the rough and tumble of being packed into the rest of the luggage well. You can choose which size gas canister to bring with it and also trust that (in most of Europe at least) you'll be able to find somewhere that sells compatible gas cannisters reasonably cheap. Here in Sweden I've discovered that Biltema is very economic.
So it's fairly economic, very portable and can hand a single pot, frying pan or kettle at a time. That sometimes means thinking carefully about sequencing and for example boiling pasta first and then leaving it to finish cooking in the hot water while I cook a sauce in a separate pan. That's not a problem though, and if it is then I have other gas stoves. I've also found it very useful to get a meal going while the wood stove heats up and then switching over to that once its warm enough.
The thing I don't like about this stove so much is the stability. I use it on the kitchen table on top of an old wood cutting board, and of course it means looking at that I don't knock it over while I'm cooking. I live in a wooden house and its not hard to imagine the whole thing falling over, the table catching fire and soon the house gone. Maybe its a bit nuts to use it like that, but the same issue of stability is important when camping with the added fun that you're usually at ground level, physically tired and perhaps cold enough to be clumsy. Maybe you don't lose a house, but it's easy to lose your pack, a whole lot of forest or your life, so the main thing is that it shouldn't be so easy to knock over.
This one is fairly good when it's standing still, but the folding legs have an annoying habit of folding as soon as the stove is moved. Or sometimes just when the gas bottle is shifted. It's not a necessarily fatal flaw, but it is something to be aware of.
The other flaw now that I've used it nearly a year is that the piezoelectric ignitor no longer lights the gas. It sparks just fine, but I can't seem to get it into the right place to set the gas on fire like it used to. I use matches instead, but its (minor) irritation.
So it's fairly economic, very portable and can hand a single pot, frying pan or kettle at a time. That sometimes means thinking carefully about sequencing and for example boiling pasta first and then leaving it to finish cooking in the hot water while I cook a sauce in a separate pan. That's not a problem though, and if it is then I have other gas stoves. I've also found it very useful to get a meal going while the wood stove heats up and then switching over to that once its warm enough.
The thing I don't like about this stove so much is the stability. I use it on the kitchen table on top of an old wood cutting board, and of course it means looking at that I don't knock it over while I'm cooking. I live in a wooden house and its not hard to imagine the whole thing falling over, the table catching fire and soon the house gone. Maybe its a bit nuts to use it like that, but the same issue of stability is important when camping with the added fun that you're usually at ground level, physically tired and perhaps cold enough to be clumsy. Maybe you don't lose a house, but it's easy to lose your pack, a whole lot of forest or your life, so the main thing is that it shouldn't be so easy to knock over.
This one is fairly good when it's standing still, but the folding legs have an annoying habit of folding as soon as the stove is moved. Or sometimes just when the gas bottle is shifted. It's not a necessarily fatal flaw, but it is something to be aware of.The other flaw now that I've used it nearly a year is that the piezoelectric ignitor no longer lights the gas. It sparks just fine, but I can't seem to get it into the right place to set the gas on fire like it used to. I use matches instead, but its (minor) irritation.
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