Cooking

The OvenPlus cooker promises a smoke-free outdoor dining experience, and with a relatively compact form that can be carted around for grilling on the go.

The outdoor gear market is saturated with super-compact, ultralight backpacking stoves, but the new Primus Firestick looks quite different from the pack. The 3.5-oz burner packs into a cylinder that's smaller than a can of Red Bull, sliding easily into a pocket or backpack pouch.

With the year winding down in a hurry, ​here's a look at the best camping gear we put through the wringer in 2018. After all, spending time outdoors is what gear innovation is all about, right?

The Singapore-based designers behind the Ember Stove aren’t ones to complicate things, taking to Kickstarter with a compact two-piece cooking solution designed to slide into your pocket and fire up with just a handful of twigs.

​When it comes to cooking in your oven, you simply set the temperature to the exact number required. For stove-top cooking, though, you have to estimate if the saucepan is at more or less the right temperature. PanPerfect offers a way of knowing exactly how hot it is.

So much of the packing time and space for camping and backpacking are dedicated to food and cooking, so it can really pay to streamline. Gerber makes it easy with two small, ultralight utensils that offer a full array of functions.

A company called Brava is launching a countertop oven that cooks food quickly and thoroughly using visible and infrared light, and if you cut through the marketing faff it looks like there might just be a useful product hiding under there.

There’s one big problem to cooking with the power of the Sun – half the time it’s gone. To extend the cookouts to all hours, GoSun has now whipped up the GoSun Fusion, which adds an electric heating element to the device.

Last year, the Cauldryn Fyre made its way to campsites. Not only can this bottle-like camp cooker heat water, it can also boil and purify unclean water. Cauldryn takes another step forward with the Fyre V2, which packs accessories, including a blender, bug zapper and percolator.

Trail Kitchens is making van camping easier with a modular kitchen block that secures inside the van and offers indoor/outdoor configurations. Forget the extensive camper van conversion, get out there and get cooking.

​​For thousands of years, any knife blade worth its salt has been forged from metal or steel, but Canadian design house Maison Milan has other ideas. It has crafted a wooden knife to carry out preparation duties in style, and can then be used to scoop up your chopped goods when you’re done. ​

An Austrian company seasoned with Latin American spice, Vaustil has melded old-school cooking techniques with new technology. The Argentine-style Primero Smart grill puts fiery coals below your meat and adds a multi-zone sensor system for tracking temperature.