When you’re traveling outdoors for stretches of days and nights, packing as much of the essentials in a small space is critical to survival. Unless you’ll be living in a camper that has all the basic amenities, you’ll be forced to choose smaller things that can fit in the trunk of a car or in a large camping bag. You can’t just be smarter about the things you bring with you, you also have to pick smarter designs that save space without compromising on features.
If you’re going to cook outdoors, a fire pit might not always be the best way to go about it. A stove is a better general-purpose option, but it’s also not the most compact or most portable either. This butane stove, however, might exactly be what you need, as it offers the best of both worlds of utility and portability. In fact, you might not even guess it’s a burner at all because it looks like a nondescript metal can when it’s all folded up and ready to be packed.
Designer: Snow Peak
The basic design of a stove really requires just two things: a burner and a stable platform to put pots and pans on. The latter is the reason why most stoves have a boxy design, including those meant to be portable. That said, those requirements are really open to interpretation, as this portable stove tries to prove. Not only does it come in the form of a canister, it barely even has any traditional flat surface you’d expect from such a cooking appliance.
When you open the canister along its length, you see what looks like some complicated mechanical contraption nested inside. In reality, you simply swing out the metal part, extend it, and split the extremities into a Y-shaped form. This becomes the trivet that can support large cookware up to 12 inches in diameter. Of course, you shouldn’t use heavy materials like cat iron or ceramic cookware, but it’s not just because the trivet won’t be able to support them.
This Home & Camp Burner doesn’t actually have its own source of heat. You actually have to screw in a CB-style butane can on the opposite end, inside the empty niche left by the burner you just swung away. The burner actually has an auto-igniter so you won’t have to bring a separate firestarter. It also sports a knob to adjust the strength of the flame. And once you’re done, you can simply fold the metal “arm” back in and store it in a safe neoprene bag or case, ready for travel once more.
That convenient compact design does have one major flaw. As mentioned, some cookware is not suitable for use with the burner, not just because of their weight. The radiant heat emitted by these pots and pans could reach the nearby fuel canister, causing it to heat up and become a fire hazard.
