Many of these backpacking cookware items can enhance your camping experience. You can make delicious curry rice dishes, seared steaks, morning eggs, bacon, and more at your own campsite. It’s important to cook with each type of material listed below, but also examine boiling speed, versatility, features, and more factors that go into cooking outdoors. Hopefully all the information below is helpful. Below are some of the best ultralight backpacking cookware items and items we hope you come to love and trust.
Table of Contents
Top 8 Best Ultralight Backpacking Cookware
1. GSI Pinnacle Camper
One of the more premium pieces of cookware has been the GSI Pinnacle Camper set. It has a credible reputation as being a high-quality product from an industry leader. Generally speaking, the individual components are tailor-made to provide a particular experience. It uses different combinations of its many features to its advantage and appears greater than the sum of its parts. With the entire kit included: it offers enough volume to cook meat and hard textures easier and serve four people. Better yet, it only takes up about as much space as a motorcycle helmet.
All of the pots and pans are coated with Teflon’s new premium non-stick material, allowing for an increase in cooking performance. It’s surprisingly very easy to clean and quickly heats water to a boil. If you are the type of person to plan on a solo session, you can select the individual components to bring along, which makes it extremely versatile for any given small group.
2. Vargo Bot
Vargo has given this product the name “BOT” as a nickname for Bottle Pot. The main thing that makes this piece of titanium special is that it can be used effectively as a pot and a bottle. The BOT will always come equipped with a tight lid designed for an easy access drink on the trail. Meanwhile, It also does well with cold-soaking because of its leak-proof lid. It remains to be one of the few rare pots that will allow you to cook one meal and cold-soak the next to this day.
Once you arrive at camp, the lid doubles as a cooking lid for boiling or simmering. However, you do need to be mindful of threading the pot so it doesn’t become misaligned. The lid can also sometimes cause stickiness due to pressure changes from sealing hot food inside the pot. Make sure you use something slim like a driver’s license and slide it between the pot and the lid to break the seal. This version of the pot includes graduated measurements and foldaway handles. The size of the pot is also big enough to hold small items such as a gas cylinder, a stove, and a lighter or matches.
3. Snow Peak Titanium Cookset
The Snow Peak Cookset is known for its incredible value as much as its production. Out of all the backpacking cookware you could start with, this is one of the least expensive sets. The complete set comes with two pots as well as lids, a small bowl, and a skillet. The pots are not as thin as most backpacking pots, and most notably the difference in the amount of heat retained is huge.
When the heat retention was tested in comparison to other cookware, the Snow Peaks Cooker’s pot beat the competition in a landslide, maintaining its total temperature for almost 90 minutes completely. However, it can be a few seconds slower to boil water than other pots, but the trade-off seems well worth it overall. There is a small pot and small lid included but if you don’t use them it can shave off a few ounces of weight.
Another slight problem with this set is that the lids don’t seem to have any kind of grip and can be difficult to remove when they get hot. You should be cautious when handling them for safety. The Snow Peak Cookset is definitely not the lightest option for backpacking cookware as well. Overall, if you’re on a budget and want to invest in long-term gear that will last, it will be hard to find a better value.
4. Keith Titanium Set
The Keith Titanium cook set is designed for more experienced campers with a higher budget who want the bigger things in life. The set includes a massive 1200 ml pot that is nearly double the capacity of the brand’s smaller single pots. The extra capacity is more ideal for serious backyard chefs or small groups that need to cook meals on a larger scale. The pieces are made to conjoin together to offer a double boiler function, which has the potential to be up to 1600 ml at a time.
However, this comes with a price as there are no graduated measurements, which is a major step down in a larger pot like this one. It can be challenging to eyeball a cup of water in a pot this large, and most people will not want to carry around a measuring cup. Similar to most pots, the Keith Titanium cook set has fold-away and non-insulated handles. The price is also reasonably low with the Keith Set often selling for less than $60.
5. Jetboil MiniMo Cooking System
The Jetboil MiniMo has been known to many for its ease of use and convenience. It’s extremely fast and quick to set up. This wide cook pot is made for much smoother cooking and eating than its predecessor known as the Jetboil Flash. Many owners of the pot also appreciate the strainer lid. It’s been said this backpacking cooking set can boil water in less than 3 minutes. While this alone is an impressive feat, it can also maintain high water heat for well over an hour.
However, one of its major setbacks is that it’s not the most versatile cookware you can buy. There isn’t any configuration that could get the stove, support the pot, and the fuel stands to sit inside the MiniMo. This is a minor trade-off for a better cooking and eating experience because of the MiniMo’s shorter and stout design. The Jetboil MiniMo is a great value if you need a compact stove that sets up in a snap and is easy to use.
6. TOAKS Titanium 750ml Pot
If you’re looking for something fast-and-light then the 3.6-ounce TOAKS Titanium 750 mL Pot can end up being the only piece of cookware you’ll need. The pot maintains its small shape and size with just enough space to fit a 4oz fuel canister and a small stove inside. This gives you the chance to have your entire set which includes a pot, stove, and fuel, taking up the amount of space of about the size of a typical coffee mug.
The newly designed titanium lid forms a tight seal allowing heat to stay trapped inside, which makes this one of the best pieces of cookware in terms of heat retention. However since it’s a backpacking cook pot, it still has a few limitations. One downside to the pot, in particular, is that if you have a big appetite the volume of food you can produce at a time could be an issue. For most popular backpacking foods, it should not be an issue because the pot is an adequate size for the majority.
The dimensions of the pot allow it to be just about the perfect size for a single pack of ramen. The pot can also boil enough water to rehydrate many frozen backpacking meals. Overall the titanium pot definitely has more positives going for it than negative. The price is very reasonable considering it is a newer titanium model, and with a durable design perfectly made for the ultralight backpacker.
7. MSR Big Titan Kettle
The MSR Titan Kettle is another great option as an ultralight backpacking pot with more cooking capacity than most while maintaining enough size to be only a tiny bit heavier than the TOAKS Titanium Pot that we talked about in the previous section. It’s known to be a sturdy pot with handles that give the user a solid grip built specifically for when the pot is full and hot.
One of its many unique features is that the lid comes stock with a drip-free spout, giving it the ability to make it easy to pour hot water without allowing any kind of mess or endangering damaging your hands. The top-lid handle is also insulated, making it extremely easy to lift the lid completely off when cooking. However, the con to this kettle is that the side handles are not able to do the same.
Another advantage of the Titan Kettle is that you can literally stick it in the fire and not worry about burning or melting the handles in any shape or form. The biggest problem with the Titan Kettle overall is its height. The kettle is slightly too short to fit a few fuel canisters. The canisters still have the ability to slide into the pot, but you can’t use the lid in some situations.
8. Evernew Titanium Pasta Pot
Of the pots available on the market right now, the Evernew Pasta Pot is the lightest pot you can purchase with this much capacity. Its premium build allows it to be extremely lightweight, compact, and strong at the same time. Along with the pot being light as a feather, its lid comes with a built-in strainer that can be great for letting steam out and straining any kind of noodles.
Some physical features along with graduated measurements are its durable rubberized coated handles. Overall, it’s a very well-made pot and feels solid in your hand when you take it to travel. It comes out of the box complete with graduated measurements in milliliters measurements along with ounces.
It’s slightly different from some pots in its competition because the ounce measurements are marked as 10 and 15 ounces instead of the prototypical 8 and 12 ounces, which are the standard number of measurements you would use for backpacking meals. The rubber handles give the user extra grip and let you safely move the pot around when it starts to heat up. As soon as you are done cooking, the packers stove, and fuel canister fit seamlessly inside the pot to be stored.
Conclusion
In conclusion, all of these backpacking cookware items fit the needs of different people as they perform different tasks. The size of something like a Vargo Bot may meet the requirements of someone that a much smaller Snow Peak Personal Cooker cannot. However, the personal cooker can perform its job more than twice as fast as the Vargo Bot, so it would be ideal for someone who likes to get their food done as quickly as possible.
Overall the perfect cookware doesn’t exist because everyone has different values in terms of size, portability, speed, quality of food, and so many more factors. But you can still find the best ultralight backpacking cookware that personally suits you. These are some of the best options in terms of the best ultralight backing cookware you can find on the market and it’s up to you to decide which is the right pick for you.
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