The Best Camping Stove

A camp stove doesn’t have to be complicated to be great. It should cook food and boil water quickly, be rugged enough to withstand travel in the back of a car, and not require a burdensome amount of fuel. After researching 26 camp stoves, testing 13, and dissecting three of them—down to the welded copper tubing and soldered burner plates—we discovered that the Coleman Classic Propane Camping Stove is exactly that: uncomplicated yet great.

The most important feature of the Coleman Classic Propane Camping Stove is its reliability—despite getting tossed in and out of our cars repeatedly, it continued to work perfectly. We also appreciated its versatility: This Coleman model boiled water faster than any other stove we tested under $150, yet when we turned it down low, it was gentle enough to griddle golden-brown pancakes. On a single 16-ounce tank of propane, this stove can cook with both burners on high for roughly an hour, and it has the barest minimum of parts, so it’s easy to maintain. This Coleman model does not have a piezo igniter (that little red button on a lot of stoves, including the Camp Chef Mountaineer, that lights the gas), so you’ll need to bring a lighter. To us, that just means there’s one fewer thing to break (and if you’re paying less than $150 for a stove, the piezo igniters almost always break).

If our top pick is out of stock or you’d like a little more cooking control (and potentially a touch more durability for more frequent use), the Coleman Cascade 222 2-Burner Camping Stove represents the next step up over the Coleman Classic. What separates it from the Classic (and adds to the price tag) is more control throughout the range of cooking temperatures. It boils water a bit faster than the Classic while still providing a gentle flame that lets you cook foods more delicately than on the Classic (for instance, if you prefer your eggs soft scrambled). It also includes a piezo ignition, which is fine as long as you don’t expect that component to last forever (none of them do). The Cascade case is easier to carry thanks to its included handle.

The heavy-gauge, all-aluminum Camp Chef Mountaineer is built like the tough, classic camping equipment you hear salty old-timers or vintage-equipment nerds talk about. It’s more expensive than either of our Coleman picks, but if you’re comfortable with the jump in cost, the Mountaineer is worth the investment. Weighing just over 16 pounds, it’s 4 pounds heavier than the Coleman Classic. But with its large, three-way windscreen, a hookup for a big (5 to 20 pounds) propane bottle, and a 40,000 Btu output (double that of the Coleman Classic), the Mountaineer lets you do more in the way of high-heat cooking than our other picks. For instance, you can sear a steak or blister peppers at a higher heat than on our other picks for a darker char in faster time, which means you can cook more food in the same amount of time. And the controls allow for some impressive subtlety. But managing them does require a certain amount of finesse—with a stove this powerful, it’s easier to burn your food than to keep the heat low. This stove is great for the most committed car campers and outdoor gourmets, but for most campers, its cost and durability are overkill.

Though you probably won’t be hauling the Original FireDisc Portable Propane Cooker far from your car (in total it weighs 55 pounds, the most of any stove we tested), it does break down into three fairly easy-to-carry components: two supporting trusses and one large pan. It has the simplicity and strength of something you’d expect to last a lifetime (with the proper care). In other words, the FireDisc should last a lot longer than its five-year limited warranty. It has a single-pan design (think of a wok or a paella pan, though the FireDisc is most closely related to a Mexican discada), so you can do away with the usual pots, pans, and sear plates—and make your cooking station a lot less complicated. Cooking on the FireDisc is akin to using a large griddle plate: You can make a single large-pot meal, like a stew or fry-up, or set up zones for different foods, as you might when preparing fajitas. Either way, to some extent you’re inevitably cooking everything together, and the heat controls are limited.