Finding the HOLY GRAIL of camping cook kits

with all of the options out there for a backpacking cook kit it is a lot to process today i'm going to show you many of the cook systems i've used over the years and a few i haven't even tried yet at the end of the video i'll show you what i think is the best budget cook kit available and a favorite of all time damn where's all that noise man are you good oh uh i can't find the cookie we're supposed to talk about today uh is it that one yeah it was there [Music] so there's a bunch of different ways to cook out in the back country a lot of different opinions a lot of different styles of cooking some people love to sort of base camp and then you know plan a big epic meal for a lot of different people some people love to just cook water boil water and put it into a freeze-dried meal what i first started out with was this one here this is just some cheap chinese pot that i got off of amazon this might be the first pot i ever bought for backpacking and i quickly graduated from this now there's nothing wrong with this it's just aluminum very inexpensive and i call it a cheap chinese pot because i don't even know the brand name of it then i tried to lighten up as much as i possibly could um i tried alcohol stoves if you don't know what an alcohol stove is i've just got two of them to show you here just really small uh tin cans really that you put denatured alcohol in you can find this at gas stations it's the yellow bottle of heat you can find it pretty much anywhere and that's really nice because if you are on a backpacking trip you don't have to like hope that rei or something is open or some outdoor store is open to try to get fuel that you may have needed for another stove you can with an alcohol stove you can find this literally anywhere and uh these are nice for a couple reasons one they're extremely lightweight like this is probably the lightest weight you can go and they come with a little stand here you can put your pot on top of it like this you light your stove put the stand around the stove and you're good to go what i don't like about these is you can't control the flame uh it's one flame always the same temperature pretty much and it takes quite a while to boil water it takes like sometimes eight ten twelve minutes to boil a cup or two of water the other cool thing about these is that they in the wintertime they work so below freezing weather these are great uh for that reason so if you want the most ultralight option look at alcohol stoves these are probably the most ultra light options available and then there's a difference between the different types of pots that you can get you can get titanium like this one here this is a tocs 550 milliliter pot these are nice this will hold about two cups of water or you can get uh the aluminum pot as well but titanium was what i graduated to uh the problem with titanium though is that it almost transfers heat too well so like this thing will get extremely hot very very quickly and it will cool down very very quickly and if you don't have water inside of it it will kind of warp and melt and burn the bottom of the pot and kind of mess it up that way and cooking on a titanium pot or titanium pan can kind of be a pain as well because things tend to burn to it so these are really good in my opinion for just boiling water not really cooking in it because stuff is really going to stick inside of these so if you want to cook like a meal or a food or if you're like planning on like you know chopping up some onions and sausage and that kind of thing you're cooking eggs you're going to want to look at something like this this is a just an aluminum pan from msr and it has a non-stick coating on the inside very similar to a pan that you'd probably have like at your house and it's just great to be able to have something to cook with this type of a surface in it because you're not spending a ton of cleaning when you're done this is the first stove i ever bought this is a a canister stove that i got on amazon just some cheap chinese piece of garbage and uh it had great reviews and a lot of people had some really good experiences with this thing but it just it it crapped out uh but then uh i ended up picking up a soto windmaster that's this one here these are great these are just canister stoves as well a little bit heavier and then the thing about this one is it's got a detachable pot support to it so you can take the pot support on and off this is the the lighter weight one or if you have like a skillet like this you can get the larger pot support like this one and this will somehow there we go connect down there as well and that way you can put a larger pot on here or a larger pan on here and cook like that so that's kind of nice too and it does fold up but the problem with this one is it's just just a little bit more work to it it sounds kind of lazy but it's true you got separate pieces you have to connect them to cook this thing can be finicky or remember how to put it on i can do it right now because i just did it but sometimes you're sitting on the back country like man how did i get that on there it's kind of a pain and it's just bulky so when you try to pack this thing back up like in a pot it takes up a lot of room uh but you know you can take it apart i guess and fit it in that way but so it's great and this does really really really well in the wind and it's actually very very quiet i think this is probably the quietest of the canister stoves that i own oh and if you don't know what a canister stove is let me back up it just is a stove that attaches directly to your canister that's what that is the other stove that i really have been loving lately is this one very similar actually to the soto it's the msr pocket rocket deluxe now this is these are both around the same price they both have self igniters on them so you just click the little button here you don't need like a a separate um lighter to light these or a separate spark to get the flame to come on uh so that's really nice and i like this one though the msr because everything's just built in and it folds up a little bit easier in my opinion it's just everything's just right there and it also has a self igniter on here which is really really nice the difference though between these two stoves is that the soda you can kind of see it right there the pot stand it's just the pot is going to sit a little bit closer to the heat source so i think probably a little bit more efficient probably a little more efficient the msr is nice because depending on the size cup it's a little bit angled so cups and pots might not slide around as easily on this one but it's not going to be as efficient but i mean we're talking like seconds in boil time like within 5 10 15 seconds one's going to be boiling faster than the other so if fuel efficiency is of the utmost importance and you're just like man i don't want to run out of fuel and i don't want to carry hardly any fuel you might want to look at the soda windmaster but you're really nitpicking at that point so this is uh a caldera caldura cone i think it's called really interesting uh cook system here this just folds in on itself like i've only used this maybe once or twice i'm not a fan to be honest with you that's not my favorite but it sits like this and this one was built for this specific pot over here but basically what how this one works is you take your alcohol stove right got your alcohol stove can you see that you see that alcohol stove you light it you put this windscreen around it and then this pot slides in there and the goal is to like focus heat to make the alcohol stove more efficient now the problem with this is that this is so sharp you can cut yourself really easy on here because i've done it and this is just so bulky it's just a lot of a lot of stuff to bring around so if you're like an alcohol stove person and you know you're really sold on your alcohol stove and this is what you that's what this looks like windscreens do you need a windscreen i never bring a windscreen ever unless i'm using an alcohol stove which is pretty rare so i don't really bring the windscreens the windscreen just kind of goes around your stove protects the flame from going out keeps it a little bit more efficient if you really need a windscreen while you're out there use something you already brought like you know set your backpack up on the other side of it or try to you know cook near a large boulder or a rock or a tree or something that's going to kind of block the wind all right oh and then let's talk about the jet boil here we've talked about this quite a bit in other videos but jetboil has been great just because it's so versatile for a lot of different cooking situations uh being able to cook bigger meals it's got like a cup slash measuring cup it's got pot stand so efficient probably the most efficient of the stoves that i've got as far as fuel goals and then i just like that it's got this like uh koozie built-in koozie a built-in koozie yeah you like koozie on the outside so everything just stays like nice and you know cooled down in your hand so that's kind of nice and you know everything nests really good in here so i can fit one of the smaller fuel canisters in there when it's all put together properly i can fit that in there and everything is really nice and compact a little bit heavier uh but you know that's a weight penalty you're gonna get for uh some of the features that it's got but this is really really great for a little bit more back country cooking with this one here you can put this on a pot stand and cook all right uh maybe you've oh we forgot to talk about this this is actually a pretty interesting stove too back to the super ultra light stuff this is probably the most ultralight stove ever this is a esbit cube stove and as big cube if you follow my channel at all you know that i like as bit cubes because they're little fuel tablets they're little fuel tablets that i use as fire starters i don't really use them to cook but i don't want to take it out here because these things stink they stink like oh man you smell that can you smell that take a whiff that is pretty horrible that's pretty rancid oh my gosh we're gonna be quick that's bad but the esb cube when you open you put it in here you light it burns for like 10 minutes and then you could put your pot on there like that you could put a windscreen around it uh so these are this is probably the most ultra light you could get probably more ultra light than an alcohol stove really but finicky kind of a pain in the butt smells like it's it's just i got we're done we're we're done yeah fish food oh my gosh i'm gonna have to leave i'm gonna have to kill this whole video we have to stop everything that we're doing right now that's how bad this is all right should we talk about my one of my favorite pots this is one of my favorite pots so if you follow my channel for any length of time uh if you're one of the early people of this channel like people that have been around since the beginning you'll remember this pot this is my uh ultralight ever new titanium pasta pot this is so good so good especially for like it'll it'll almost act like a jetboil in a couple ways because it's got the strainer here so you can like cook noodles and stuff in here and you can tip it and strain it which is really nice now the lid stays on pretty apparently it doesn't stay on it does stand the lid stays on pretty good snaps on so when you're boiling water you can tip it and the the lid shouldn't fall off depending on how like heavy the food is in there but i always get nervous so i'll take like my spoon or something and you know do this to kind of strain it just to make sure that it's sort of a fail-safe right you know what i'm talking about okay good uh but that's that's what and it's a one liter pot but this is super ultra light like ridiculously ultralight and it's like stupid expensive it's like a 70 pot is that small yeah it's a 70 got a lot of stuff going for it though it's got these uh silicone handles here a little plastic lid that you can grab like this and the base on it's really wide i love that because it's more efficient so uh you know it's more surface area to be able to heat up to cook the other thing i like about this too is that you can put the bigger canisters in this one so like if you're worried about like fuel efficiency or if you're cooking for more than just you and you're using a lot of fuel this big uh this is the two this is the 230 gram uh fuel can see that down there 230. that'll that'll fit right in there so that's kind of nice and then you could hopefully fit your depending on what stove you brought sometimes you can fit them in there sometimes you can't but okay like that that's not going to fit in there but this little baby that might fit in there there we go so you know you just got to kind of mess around and try to figure out what's going to fit in there um but if i was bringing this pot normally i'm bringing the smaller one and then i could fit a larger stove in there that kind of thing and then uh just as a phil say if somebody one of my subscribers a long time ago gave me this rubber band that i can uh wrap everything up and that's kind of nice so this is a man this is such a good pot dude this thing is so good it's definitely been through the ringer all right so we got there now let's talk about stuff that i have never even used yet this is on the list to test all right so tell me if you guys are excited are you i'm stoked he's such a liar nobody is stoked about a cook pot that i'm about to test oh dude you're probably sitting at home being like i can't believe i'm watching this i can't believe i'm talking about this okay that's how i feel no i'm just kidding all right so we got the sodo this is a soto pot i don't remember the name of it i don't even know i bought it like a month and a half ago just haven't used it yet but i'm really excited to try it out i was just looking for some stuff to test out so uh it comes with this nice koozie case got a little lid on here it's kind of nice okay and then it's this is a one liter no 750 milliliters oh that's because it's the stove that i bought with i forgot about this i'm gonna be trying this stuff out this is the soto amicus i think stove it's just like uh it's made by soto uh like the windmaster just the one master yeah it's a windmaster so just a little bit smaller it's a little bit more like the pocket rocket it's just smaller so it folds out okay like the pocket rocket okay everything's built in that's why i was excited about this one because i wanted to i wanted to see um would this one be the best of both worlds because it's also got a self igniter and it's a little bit cheaper so i'll let you know haven't tried it yet i've heard great things about it a lot of people talk about this stove is it's great stove so amicus i'm looking forward to checking that one out so that came in this whole cook kit and i just wanted to try something new i also bought something i've never used is uh this here this is a little coffee coffee coffee maker it's a little coffee maker check that out so basically what you do uh you just set this right on top of your cup it comes with these coffee filters that you could pick up pretty much anywhere put that in there put your coffee in there and it's a little pour over you know i'm talking about a little little pour over so you need a separate cup obviously you need two cups it's gonna be a two cupper a two cupper all right so you're gonna bring two cups but if you like your coffee you're gonna bring two cups right so you're gonna do a little pour over coffee so i'm excited to try it out because i'm a coffee guy am i a coffee guy i like huge coffee i'm a huge coffee guy it's pretty it's actually i don't want to talk about it i don't want to talk about it right now because that's a whole separate channel that's a that's a self-help channel that's what that is right there should we talk about it how many cups is that today don't worry about it man that's the day of your business anyway don't worry about it so we're gonna try out the little coffee maker i've only really used uh the instant coffee packets and so everybody talks about different ways to make coffee in a lightweight way so we're gonna try that out oh here's another piece of gear that i have not tried yet i haven't even tried i wanted to try it this winter but it just never it never worked out my my winter trip my big winter trip that i was gonna do got completely cancelled so uh but this is what do we get oh this is the windpro 2 by msr so really excited to try this out so this is for winter conditions so if you have a standard fuel cancer like this um these below freezing don't work very well because it turns back into a liquid or a gas i'm terrible at science but they just don't work you got to warm these up this is meant to make sure that your gas canister stays upside down so the fuel comes out properly that's going to sit in here like this like that and then you can control it light it you know and you've got your dinner that's going to cook or your whatever so meant for winter meant for extreme conditions cold weather so i'm really excited to try this out next year apparently because we just hit spring thank god we just hit spring i'm so glad we just was speaking all right all right now let's get to the holy grail all right this is the holy grail here we go holy grail i've got a couple of options for you as far as what i think are probably the best buy for the least amount of weight so if you want a really lightweight stove system and that's just awesome i would recommend this for sure um there's a couple options but this one for sure this is the tocs titanium 750 milliliter pot this is perfect for me to fit my fuel can and and i could also fit a larger stove in there so i got the pocket rocket in there pop the lid on and you're good to go isn't that awesome so everything fits in here now it's baby brother is what a lot of people use which is this one here this is the tocs 550 milliliter pot and these are really inexpensive for titanium there's probably some of the cheapest out there you can fit this in here like this but then you can't fit like a a larger stove in there if you are sold on this particular pot system you can go out and you can buy this tiny little guy um this is a cheap very cheap like 15 maybe 20 bucks and probably the lightest weight smallest stove on amazon out there and this is literally everybody thinks this is called the brs stove this is a no-name stove because i've tricked you i've tricked you did you know i tricked you i guess not yeah well you're here to find out right now this is the brs stove this is not the brs stove yet they are absolutely identical this one is called the fojas see if you can get those names on there can you see those names this is a fojas stove and this is the brs stove what i think is is that this is just some standard you know design of a stove and a bunch of different companies are putting their name on it everybody seems to think that brs is like the only company company making this kind of stuff it's not it's just the one that caught on to being popular so you're gonna find this cheap chinese stove online and it works it's not my favorite honestly it's not the most reliable i have gone through uh one of these before that just leaked and it was just garbage it was not a fun stove to work with and they're not very efficient either they're okay but but i know i'm going to hear about that in the comments so there are people that have used this on their entire through hike of like the appalachian trail or the pacific crest trail or the continental divide trail so they will vouch for the stove and that's great but not my favorite but if you want a stove that will fit in here you can get this stove and once you get it to fold up what i like to do is throw that in there throw that on top and then you can kind of cram that lid on and that'll fit into the the baby brother the baby brother pop this is the the 550 milliliter pot so that's pretty cool super super ultra light okay all right this is my favorite this is my second favorite this is like my all-time favorite i have a lot of favorites i got a lot of favorites i really do but these are all great cooking pots all right but if you want like super cheap do you like cheap absolutely cheap he likes cheap i just graduated college he just graduated college so he likes inexpensive stuff he's got to be able to afford the backpacking gear you're going to look at this right here this is the stanley pot you can find this on amazon i think i picked this up for under 10 bucks now i don't think it's always under 10 bucks it's usually maybe around 15 bucks this is a stainless steel pot a little bit heavier but this thing is bulletproof man this thing you could literally drop this off of a you could literally you could climb mount everest throw this off and it would still survive have i tested that you betcha you betcha all right this will fit the uh the smaller fuel cans it's kind of nice and it's got oh look out oh it's got a really nice lid on it solid solid as a rock and then just like that done and then it comes with i think two of these but i may or may not have lost one because i don't use these the whole kit a little heavy a little bulky but if you don't bring these cups man i mean we're talking inexpensive solid as a rock if you're clumsy in the backcountry and you just drop stuff all the time this might be for you but i'm going to put the price of this up on the screen just so you can see how inexpensive if you get the brs cheap chinese stove and uh this pot i mean we're talking maybe 30 bucks is what you spent and you got a a really really quality uh cook set and then real quick let's talk utensils real fast my favorite utensil i can't find it we looked for it did we not we looked for it we could not find it so i'm gonna tell you what it is as a matter of fact i'll put it on the screen right now this is it this is my favorite spoon of all time but this is a backup just to kind of give you an example if you are going to buy a backpacking spoon i encourage you to buy a long handled spoon the big reason you want to have a long-handled spoon is because when you're getting down into those mountain house meals or those freeze-dried meal bags you want a long spoon to be able to get to the bottom of it and you're not going to get your hand all dirty rather than having something you know smaller like this little guy this was this was back when i was ultra lighting this is a gsi piece of garbage it's like a inch long but you're definitely gonna get your hand all nasty dirty with this thing but all right there it is the holy grails oh is that a grill it's not really a grill it's more of a it's a pot it's a steel pot the holy soup the holy steel pot here we go these these are it right there this is what i would recommend if you're just looking to boil water this is it right here uh if you're looking to do anything else just go out and buy a jet bowl expensive but if you want to like start your cooking adventures you could do that anyway i hope that helps you guys out just to kind of see my evolution in uh pots not pot don't do drugs and we'll see you guys on the next one

Channel: Dan Becker

Views: 356,865

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Id: QzPzNhe6k_o

Length: 24min 33sec (1473 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 25 2022