Tips for Choosing a Camping Stove
Camping stoves are among the basic equipments that anyone would need for a camping trip. After all, you will need something to cook your food with, and you obviously can’t order takeout when you are in the middle of the woods. Choosing a camping stove to buy is not a complicated process, although the number of choices available can make it rather confusing to a novice camper. Here are some tips you can follow to make sure you end up with the correct choice.
How to Select the Right Type of Camping Stove
Before you troop to the camping supplies store and buy your own portable stove for your upcoming outdoor adventure, it would be wise to learn about the different types of stoves first, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of each type. You may also want to experiment with building your own stove, which is what many campers do in order to save money.
Coleman Camping Stove
For most beginners though, buying one from the stores is considered to be the better and safer option. In this case, one of the best brands that you might want to consider is Coleman. Coleman has been making various models of camping stoves for years now, including the Feather, the Outlander, the Apex II and the Gaz Turb.
If you are looking for a camping stove that is very portable, lightweight and comes with a number of different features, the Coleman Instastart would be a very good choice. This stove is small enough to fit comfortably even in a small backpack, and can be used for many purposes, from boiling water to cooking a full meal.
What’s nice about most camping stoves these days is that in terms of functionality, they are practically just mini-versions of the stoves that most of us have at home. For this reason, you don’t have to restrict the use of your portable stoves to the woods. You can also use them at home in case there is a problem with your regular cooking equipment.
Although camping stoves these days come in many different designs and styles, what they have in common is that they all run on gas. Some even come with detachable gas tanks that can easily be refilled when used up. Refilling these tanks is quite simple — all you have to do is use the fill port and the built-in pump for compressing the gas.
Outdoor Cooking for Beginners – How to Use Camping Stoves
If you are planning to go camping, whether it is just for one night or for several days, one of the important skills you need to learn is how to use camping stoves to prepare your meal. Of course, you can just bring along some pre-cooked meals but there’s not much fun in that. The only way to get a completely satisfying camping experience is if you actually cook the food yourself outdoors, either over the campfire or by using a stove. Of these two methods, camping stoves are more convenient and also much safer. In fact, building campfires is now prohibited in certain areas due to the fire hazard, so bringing a stove along is definitely the better alternative.
Styles and Brands of Camping Stoves
There are many different brands, styles and designs of camping stoves that you can choose from, but what most of them have in common is their portability and light weight, which makes them easy to lug around while hiking to your camping grounds. These portable stoves can be classified into four major categories, based on the kind of fuel that is used. The most popular ones are the single-burner stoves that require you to put a liquid fuel onto the burner before use. There are also single-burners that come with their own fuel tanks, which are a little bit larger but also more convenient to use.
The third type of camping stoves are the gas stoves. These may have multiple burners and have more advanced features for adjusting the height of the flame or the amount of gas used. Basically, they are miniature versions of gas stoves found in many kitchens. Finally, there are the stoves that come with a priming pan, where spirits drip down because of gravity. These types are rarely used today since being replaced by the gas stoves, such as the propane camp stove.
Outdoor Cooking
Although cooking with a camping stove is a lot safer than cooking over a campfire, there are still certain risks that you should be careful about. For instance, when there is a particularly strong wind in the camping ground, this can cause the flame to be uneven, making the stove less effective. Many stoves do come with a wind shield to reduce these risks, so that is something worth considering.
The main disadvantage of buying camping stoves with wind shields is the larger size of the stove. As an alternative, many campers choose to just create their own makeshift wind shields to use with ordinary stoves. However, this is a practice that takes skill. If you don’t know how to do it properly, you might be better off just buying a stove with a built-in wind shield.