Our Outdoor Kitchen Gear
While our van is extremely small, being able to cook tasty meals is a huge priority to us. Whether we are cooking inside with the pop-top up, or outside with our outdoor table, having a freshly cooked dinner makes us truly feel at home wherever we are.
For some background: I (Hannah) love cooking. After getting my Bachelors degree in Food and Nutritional science from SDSU, I did a two year Culinary Arts Program with my degree specifically in Baking and Pastry. After graduating I worked in various kitchens until I made my way to a custom cake bakery making everything from small specialty desserts to large, extravagant wedding cakes. This was a hard job to leave when we hit the road full time and left San Diego, however I know cakes will always be there for me in the future if I choose to get back into it. Though our VW bus certainly doesn’t have a camping oven to bake a cake in, I still find any way I can to make fancy meals and even some fun stovetop desserts.
Onto our gear:
Since we have been on the road for over a year and a half now, we feel we have a good idea of what cooking gear works best for us. The most important kitchen items we travel with have to be our Camp Chef Everest Stove and our Jetboil MiniMo. Our stove has two burners and runs off simple camping propane bottles. For quickly heating foods up, our Jetboil runs very efficiently on isobutane and serves a variety of purposes to us. We can boil water, use our Pot Support Attachment to put small pans over the flame and even make coffee with our French Press Attachment.
As for tools, our Messermeister knife set provides us a nice sharp chef knife combined with the ability to fold in for safe travel through our camping adventures.
How do we store our food on the road? With our Dometic fridge that runs 24/7 in our van, we have the normalcy of fresh food and cold drinks at all times. The power draw isn’t too significant and the Dometic app allows me to control the temperature and ice maker from my phone very easily.
With such a small amount of cabinet space, we can fit multiple pots and pans in one small spot with our GSI Pinnacles Base Camp set. This 8 piece set contains two pots, a frying pan, two strainer lids, a cutting board and even a flexible wash bag that holds it all together.
While the JetBoil can easily be used inside the bus, the Camp Chef stove needs a tad bit more space. While its convenient when a campsite has a nice picnic table to set up on, we gave ourselves the ability to cook wherever we are with our own pop up cooking table stashed in the van at all times. Our GCI Outdoor Slim-Fold Cooking Station is the perfect landing zone for our stove and has 4 extra surfaces that fold out to conveniently keep all of our tools and ingredients right where we need them as dinner is prepped.
Now what if we feel like grilling over the fire? We travel with the smallest little Camping Grill in a bag from Wolf & Grizzly. This grill rolls up into a tiny bag and is perfect for grilling some food for two people. Sometimes it just tastes better over an open flame!
Lastly, lets talk about our stylish chairs that we sit in outside to enjoy our food! To match our retro vibe, our ZipDee Outdoor fold out chairs are sturdy, comfortable and fold up very flat for easy storage. Not only are these vibe-y chairs perfect for chilling outside, but we have a matching fold out table that also stores away incredibly flat. We have been really happy with these chairs over the past year and love that they are sturdy enough to last through all of our adventuring without needing to build camping chairs from a bag. We have even put different color fabric on the frames over the months!
Whether you are looking for gear to go camping here and there or live full time in your van, everyones needs are different. We have to be very particular about what gear travels with us with such a small space to store things in, so hopefully these recommendations can help you in one way or another to get ready to cook on the road!
Check out some of this gear in action making some of our favorite recipes:
