This stove is great for the most committed car campers and outdoor gourmets, but for most campers, its cost and durability are overkill. If you love to create kitchen-quality or “gourmet” food from scratch in rustic conditions, this is the stove for you. The Mountaineer is larger (at 25¼ by 13¾ by 5¼ inches, it dwarfs our top pick). It’s heavier (17 pounds, versus the Coleman Classic’s 11 pounds).
When cooking one pancake at a time, this stove is fabulous — two or more revealed a hot spot in the center of the pan, a pretty typical issue for stoves with small burners. While compact stoves such as this one can fit larger pans, they generally aren’t able to heat them evenly. And while making scrambled eggs is fine if you babysit them, if you try to walk away, you’ll find that even the low setting on the Classic is a bit high. There isn’t a graphic on the dial to represent flame settings (low to high), but in our experience, these graphics are rarely very accurate on camp stoves.
When you’re done, the removable rust-resistant, aluminum-steel cook top makes cleaning quick and easy. If you have a space where you can safely store a propane tank, you could also consider refillable alternatives. If you’re car camping and don’t mind the extra weight, 5-pound propane tanks and adapter hoses are available; they can hook up directly to these stoves.
When you’re looking for a compact stove to take on the trail, pack the Coleman Bottle Top Propane Stove. Pan above a fully adjustable burner that delivers up to 10,000 BTUs of cooking power. The PerfectFlow technology will keep the heat steady, and you’ll use less fuel too thanks to the Perfectheat technology. Wind baffles help shield your flame from the wind so the most heat possible goes into making your meal.
On average it took around four minutes to get a couple cups of water to boil, but on windy days that was sometimes doubled. Cooking capacity is very important when you’re in the market for a new camping stove. Canister stoves can’t support the weight of larger
pots, so you may want to use a liquid fuel stove if you have more people to cook for. BTU, or British Thermal Unit, is a measurement of heat output. More specifically, it’s the amount of energy needed to heat 1 pound of water by 1 degree Fahrenheit.
Uncovered, the Coleman Classic boiled water in 5 minutes on the right burner and 6 minutes 30 seconds on the left burner. The Coleman Classic also boiled water 3 minutes faster than the more expensive (and reportedly more powerful) Coleman FyreCadet. What separates it from the Classic (and adds to the price tag) is more control throughout the range of cooking temperatures.
The Coleman Cascade Burner Camping Stove represents a slight step up from our top pick, the Coleman Classic, in cooking control and power. If you like the features of the Coleman Classic but also want the option to serve your scrambled eggs extra-soft or to bring your veggies down to a much slower simmer, this stove will serve you well. When you’re using larger pots and pans, a neat feature of this stove is that the lid can lie completely flat, which creates more stovetop room (unlike on the Coleman FyreCadet). And although this arrangement removes wind protection, it lends a little more flexibility when you’re cooking for a crowd in a sheltered spot. It has a green textured enamel surface that holds up against scratches.
If speed is a priority for your boiling needs, however, one option is to pair the Classic with a rapid-boiling backpacking model like the JetBoil MiniMo. Not only will this mean you get your morning coffee faster, but it frees up a burner to make extra pancakes. For the jaw-dropping price ($470) of the Snow Peak GigaPower Double Burner Stove, it should be the best camping stove you can buy, or at least the most versatile. Although it’s made from excellent materials and built to the standards that Snow Peak is famous for, this stove misses the mark.
The Stansport Boulder Series 2-Burner Propane Stove disappointed us with its overall build quality and terrible low-temperature control. Over the years we’ve had wildly variable results from similar Stansport stoves. Another close Stansport model, the Regulated Propane Stove, was once an upgrade pick but is now plagued by stock issues. If you can’t manage the extra weight,
consider purchasing a refillable 1-pound bottle and kit from Flame King (pictured below). As with the 5-pound option, with this one the savings are significant when you consider how much cheaper it is to refill a propane tank with gas directly than it is to buy a disposable bottle. We tried a recipe that, to cook properly, required the lowest stove temperatures.
During the windy test, it consumed 1 ounce of fuel, and in the wind-less test, it used 0.6 ounces of fuel. Out of all our tested stoves, this one ranked in the upper third of the windy fuel test. This stove is likely more fuel efficient owing to the lower output 10,000 BTU burners and the snug windscreens.