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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.
This straightforward, rugged two-burner stove cooks food quickly and evenly. And it’s less than half the price of other stoves we tested.
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 our runner-up and upgrade picks, that lights the gas), so you’ll need to bring a lighter. To us, that’s just one fewer thing to break (and if you’re paying less than $150 for a stove, the piezo igniters almost always break).
Runner-up Coleman Cascade 222 2-Burner Camping StoveMore precision The Cascade is similar to the Classic stove, but it allows you to adjust cooking temperatures with more precision and includes a handle for easier carrying. However, it costs more.Buying Options$170 from REI $170 from Coleman
The Cascade is similar to the Classic stove, but it allows you to adjust cooking temperatures with more precision and includes a handle for easier carrying. However, it costs more.
If our top pick is out of stock or you’d like more cooking control (and potentially a touch more durability), 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.
Due to its solid construction, this two-burner stove is heavier to carry than the Coleman models and more expensive. But the Mountaineer also has a more-powerful output, so you can cook on it like it’s your home stove.
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 may be 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 at a higher heat than on our other picks for a darker char more quickly, which means you can cook more food in the same amount of time. Managing the controls does require 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-camping gourmets, but for most campers, its cost and durability are overkill.
If you often cook for a crowd, the FireDisc’s paella-pan-like design is ideal for making big meals. This stove is great for those who don’t want to tote extra cookware.
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. 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.
This straightforward, rugged two-burner stove cooks food quickly and evenly. And it’s less than half the price of other stoves we tested.
The Cascade is similar to the Classic stove, but it allows you to adjust cooking temperatures with more precision and includes a handle for easier carrying. However, it costs more.
Due to its solid construction, this two-burner stove is heavier to carry than the Coleman models and more expensive. But the Mountaineer also has a more-powerful output, so you can cook on it like it’s your home stove.
If you often cook for a crowd, the FireDisc’s paella-pan-like design is ideal for making big meals. This stove is great for those who don’t want to tote extra cookware.
I interviewed Matthew McKean—a camp chef and expedition leader for Canadian wilderness lodge Outpost Co. and the rugged Keewaydin canoe camp in Ontario—about his experiences cooking for large parties in all manner of outdoor situations.
As for me, I’ve covered gear as a journalist at Wirecutter since 2014. For a while I lived in a makeshift community in Hawaii, cooking on propane stoves just like these for nine months.
These stoves are not for backpacking expeditions, but if you use a car or truck as the base for your overnight trips, two-burner camp stoves are fundamental to a successful car-camping adventure. They’re essential for trips to national parks or local recreation areas, where cooking on an open fire or barbecue pit may not be allowed, especially during wildfire season.
And we’ve never heard the maxim that a tired and hungry family is a happy family. This is why two-burner camp stoves are the workhorse of any group camping trip, since they can quickly cook meals for four or more people. Simple to load and easy to carry, they’re built to be packed in the trunk beneath a pile of camping gear, pulled out after a too-long drive, and set up on a table or the ground to cook dinner without complaint. The good ones will do that. The best ones will do it for a lifetime.
You can find a few reputable (as well as less-than-reputable) sites that offer reviews of camp stoves. We began with GearLab, Camping Stove Cookout, HiConsumption, and BestProducts.com. We determined the top 16 contenders from these reviews and from researching Amazon best sellers, after which we narrowed the group down to eight models to test. In 2021, we added two more of the most promising models to our cooking-test lineup. In 2022, we tested the Cascade series of Coleman stoves.
We brought them to the beach to see how they would work in sustained winds. We also brought them to a public park to cook up a full breakfast of pancakes, bacon, eggs, and coffee. Initially, to get a baseline for each stove’s general performance, we focused on how quickly they could boil water (similar to the process of many of the sites listed above).
What we learned was that the boiling-water test isn’t nearly as important as overall stove build quality. Most of the stoves we tested could boil 6 cups of water, uncovered, within a few minutes of one another. Although that indeed offers a point of comparison, what does it matter that your stove can boil water a minute faster if, when you open it up, one of the burners has fallen apart or the propane line won’t connect to your gas tank?
What was more illuminating was a test we conducted to determine each stove’s ability to maintain a small and steady flame—which you’re likely to want if you value the precision necessary for certain recipes like soft scrambled eggs or pan-fried fish. We tried a recipe that, to cook properly, required the lowest stove temperatures. To perform this test, we consulted with Lesley Stockton, senior staff writer and guru on Wirecutter’s kitchen team, who came up with an order for soft scrambled eggs from Kitchn. Ideally, on a decent home stove, these eggs should cook for 10 to 15 minutes on the lowest possible heat.
What does it matter that your stove can boil water a minute faster if, when you open it up, one of the burners has fallen apart or the propane line won’t connect to your gas tank?
Due to a quirk in our scheduling during our first year of testing (in 2019), we ended up shipping these stoves back and forth across California a few times, and this experience consituted a unique durability test. Each time, we packed the camp stoves in their original boxes for shipping. The Camp Chef Everest, in particular, came out of that trial more or less incapacitated, with a burner broken beyond repair and a lock that refused to close properly (although the box it was shipped in sustained no damage). This test wasn’t perfect, but the rough rides in the back of a mail truck revealed weaknesses in the Everest’s design.
This straightforward, rugged two-burner stove cooks food quickly and evenly. And it’s less than half the price of other stoves we tested.
The greatest strength of the Coleman Classic Propane Camping Stove is its simplicity. Unlike many of the other stoves we tested, this one has no extra parts or elaborate accessories to break or otherwise complicate what should be an uncomplicated item. The Coleman Classic tears down into roughly six pieces: a cooking grate, two removable burners, a gas connection, the case, and the internal gas lines. That’s it. The Coleman Classic boiled water faster than nearly every other stove we tested—except for our upgrade pick—yet it still offers delicate-enough temperature control for most things you might want to cook. What it doesn’t have is an ignition switch. But for a camp stove, that’s just one more thing to break anyway.
Uncovered, the Coleman Classic boiled water in 5 minutes on the right burner and 6 minutes 30 seconds on the left burner. Though this result was fairly typical (most of the stoves we tested boiled water within 5.5 minutes to 7 minutes), it stood out compared with the time that some much-pricier models required to perform the same task; the Camp Chef Rainier, for instance, took a ridiculous 20 minutes to get water anywhere near boiling.
The cooking controls were delicate enough that we could crank up the Coleman Classic to boil water and fry bacon or turn it down to poach an egg and create golden-edged pancakes. With 10,000 Btu (British thermal units) of heat emanating from each burner on high, this stove should allow you to cook almost anything you can imagine—from burgers to a creamy chicken braise to a vegetable stir-fry. And your family and friends will be surprised by the quality.
In our comparative test for low-temperature control, the Coleman Classic cooked soft scrambled eggs from raw in 4 minutes. This result was well below the 10 to 15 minutes that the recipe calls for, yet still 2 minutes 30 seconds slower than the more-expensive (and now discontinued) Coleman FyreCadet took. Also, even though the Classic’s eggs weren’t as ethereal as those cooked for more than 10 minutes at home would be, they were still wonderfully soft.
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.
The Classic gives you plenty of cook time—about an hour on a single, 16-ounce tank of propane with both burners on maximum. Using more-typical cooking temps, we found that a single tank lasted us closer to an hour and a half, which is standard for all of the two-burner stoves we tested. Remember, however: The Classic does not come with an ignition switch, so be sure to pack your matches or lighter.
While looking at reviews of the Coleman Classic, we noticed that two common complaints repeatedly showed up: The lid can get stuck, and the cooker dials can be unresponsive.
The pressed metal of the cooktop—held in place by two thin slip rings clasped around the burner heads—has a tendency to move out of alignment, catching against the rolled inner lip of the lid when closed. At one point I had to use the handle of a spoon to pry the case open again. Other people also came across this issue. You could fix the problem using a Dremel tool and a grinder, if you have one.
Some people have also reported that the dials on their stoves can feel sticky or unresponsive. One owner posted a solution that involves about 10 minutes of labor and the application of silicone lube. Though our test unit’s dials didn’t feel unresponsive, we followed the instructions, and we were pleased with the resulting more-sensitive controls.
Coleman covers this stove with a three-year limited warranty.
The Cascade is similar to the Classic stove, but it allows you to adjust cooking temperatures with more precision and includes a handle for easier carrying. However, it costs more.
The Coleman Cascade 222 2-Burner Camping Stove represents a slight step up from our top pick, the Coleman Classic, in cooking control and power. However, it adds weight and comes at a higher price, too. 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.
The metal body of the Cascade feels a touch sturdier than that of the Classic. The Cascade weighs about 3 pounds more than the Classic, which may account for some of that feeling of sturdiness. To help you manage the extra weight, Coleman added a decent handle to the body of the Cascade.
While cooking, the Cascade can hold a 12-inch pan and a 10-inch pan side by side, same as the Classic. With 22,000 Btu (11,000 Btu from each burner), it produces a touch more heat than our top pick—not all that much for a stove that costs twice the price. If that’s all the Cascade could do, we probably wouldn’t recommend it.
Where the Cascade shines is in the finer control it allows throughout the range of temperatures. Most camping stoves, including our top pick, have a tendency to jump temperatures, from very low to very high, with barely a touch of the hand. In our testing, thanks to the Cascade’s finer control, we could gently cook soft scrambled eggs, fry an egg fully without burning the bottom, or sauté vegetables without having to move the pan every 30 seconds.
Coleman also adds some small “upgrades” to this model, among them a piezo electric ignition. It’s a nice addition, but not something we give much weight since this component tends to break over time. Coleman produces an entire Cascade line: the Cascade 222, the Cascade Classic, and the Cascade 328. The Cascade Classic isn’t much different from the Coleman Classic. The Cascade 328 adds a third burner—and a lot more bulk. The 328 might be a consideration for a larger family. Like all Coleman stoves, the Cascade line is protected by a three-year limited warranty.
The biggest flaw of the Cascade is similar to that of the Coleman Classic: The pressed metal of the Cascade’s cooktop can sometimes shift out of alignment, catching against the rolled inner lip of the lid when the entire stove is closed. It’s not a dealbreaker, though, and it might be somewhat inevitable for a stove this simply built.
Due to its solid construction, this two-burner stove is heavier to carry than the Coleman models and more expensive. But the Mountaineer also has a more-powerful output, so you can cook on it like it’s your home stove.
The Camp Chef Mountaineer is not for everyone: In both its price and its durability, this stove is overkill for all but the most committed outdoor gourmets. However, after testing about a dozen camping stoves over several years, we’ve found that the Mountaineer is the best-made and most durable classic two-burner camping stove we’ve come across.
If you love to create kitchen-quality or “gourmet” food from scratch in rustic conditions, this is the stove for you. It’s basically a beefed-up version of our top pick. 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). And it offers way more heat output (40,000 Btu, versus the Coleman Classic’s 20,000 Btu). We’ve tested the stove for only a short while, but anecdotal evidence (along with the ever-decreasing weight of our 20-pound propane tank) suggests that all this cooking power consumes propane at a prodigious clip. As a result, Camp Chef assumes that you’re not running 1-pound propane bottles with a stove like this and defaults to a hose for a larger propane tank.
Cooking with the Mountaineer is a blast. It feels far more like cooking in my kitchen, or with a traditional gas range, than any camp stove I’ve ever used. From seared ribeyes and soft eggs to delicate fish frys and blistered vegetables—if you can cook it on a burner, the Mountaineer can keep up. And after all that, the Mountaineer, with its simple, all-metal design, is especially easy to clean: All you need is some soap and a hose.
For casual outdoor cooks, however, the Mountaineer’s heavier weight and more-difficult setup (versus that of the Coleman Classic) will pose some difficulties: In particular, the gas-line connection is located on the front of the stove, instead of on the side (as with the Coleman Classic). Though this setup may be useful in certain tight situations, in most camp settings it’s more of a nuisance. Even tucked away, the hose is still too close to the controls of the right burner.
Fresh out of the box, the thick-gauge aluminum is sharp. Ideally, the edges would be smoothed and the burrs removed at the factory. So if you have a few tools, you might want to sand down or grind out the sharp corners. The Mountaineer does have an additional-leg kit, but we didn’t find the pieces helpful (the legs were too short for our needs, and they felt loose when attached). It’s better if you can set this stove on a table or some kind of camp stand.
If you often cook for a crowd, the FireDisc’s paella-pan-like design is ideal for making big meals. This stove is great for those who don’t want to tote extra cookware.
The Original FireDisc Portable Propane Cooker has a wonderfully simple design consisting of a heavy carbon-steel disc, measuring 22 inches across, that sits on a set of two interlocked steel legs. Unlike our main pick and upgrade pick (both of which are classic two-burner stoves), the FireDisc has a single burner with the pan included. It’s ideal for cooking large, one-pan meals for big groups of campers.
The cooker has a single gas burner, and it can run on a 1-pound canister or, with an adapter hose, a 20-pound tank. Depending on what’s cooking, most people are likely to prefer a tank over a smaller canister to ensure that they don’t run out of gas. The single burner creates a high-heat zone in the center of the disc. FireDisc says you control the temperature by moving the food around, but we’d prefer to see better heat controls. The supplied heat control on the gas valve is about as sensitive as a rocket-launch sequence: off, on, and to the moon.
Temperature control in this situation is more about cooking capacity than cooking control. In this case, higher gas output means you get a larger searing center for a bigger meal. With recipes such as tacos de discada (video), this kind of heat control works well: As each element—fatty meats, vegetables, sauce—of the meal cooks, you move it to the outer rim to simmer, and then you blend everything together at the end. But this method can be a little more difficult when, for example, you’re cooking burgers or hot dogs, as the center is way too hot for searing a burger, and rotating a few of them around the outer edges of the disc while trying to get a uniform char is tricky.
However, because of this stove’s single large cooking surface, you can cook for far more people far more quickly than you normally could with a smaller, cast-iron pan. The high walls of the FireDisc enable you to more easily make stews, fry-ups, and casseroles than you can with any piece of camp-cooking equipment we’ve ever tested.
The solid, heavy steel of the FireDisc and its sturdy design make this cooker exceptionally hefty: The short model is 55 pounds in total, so it is cumbersome to haul around, and you likely won’t want to carry this far from your car or campground. The FireDisc comes with a five-year warranty, but it’s hard to imagine that the cooking disc would fail before that warranty ran out. With the proper care (as well as decent storage when it’s not in use), a piece of equipment like this should last a lifetime.
If you’re trying to save weight (and wind won’t be a problem): Consider the Jetboil Genesis Basecamp Stove, which is lightweight and compact. Because of its folding design and its lack of a proper windscreen, it’s too specialized for this guide, but that doesn’t make it a bad stove. Quite the opposite. The Genesis is still probably too bulky for long hiking trips. But its excellent stove qualities, provided that you manage to keep it out of the wind, make it a good, if expensive ($280) pick for specific situations: I imagine a space-saving car-camping trip or a canoe journey.
If money is no object but packing space is: The GSI Pinnacle Pro Stove is by far the slimmest stove we tested (1.4 inches thick when closed) and superbly built. It boiled water just about as quickly as our top pick and slow-cooked eggs with the same precision. However, at $250, it is many times the price, so we’re comfortable being nitpicky about flaws: The remarkable slimness of the stove means heat dissipates less, the bottom becomes extremely hot during cooking, and the body of the stove doesn’t lock when it’s closed for transport.
If the Coleman Classic and Cascade are both sold out: Look for the Coleman Triton 2-Burner Propane Gas Camping Stove, which is practically the same as our top pick but in a more modern case. The same strengths and flaws apply. If our Coleman picks aren’t available, this stove is a viable replacement (though it does cost more than the Classic).
Although cooking on a camp stove is usually more fuel efficient than cooking over a campfire, here’s the awful truth of the standard 1-pound propane tanks that power these stoves: They’re built to be disposable while also especially difficult to properly dispose of. Empty propane tanks are considered hazardous waste in most of the United States, so they are difficult to recycle. (They could explode if they’re not completely empty.) You could take them to a hazardous-waste facility, but such places are not always easy to find (see below for help). As a result, most tanks end up stockpiled in people’s garages, abandoned near campsites, or dumped as trash.
Although disposable-bottle refill kits are legal to buy, it remains illegal to commercially transport one-use bottles after they have been refilled. Improper filling can be dangerous and lead to injury. Coleman, on its bottles, expressly recommends not doing this—though some people still do (video).
There are some safer solutions, however.
Bernzomatic offers a good resource to help you track down your local solid-waste disposal authority and take the proper measures before disposing of your tanks. Contact your local government or recycling company to determine whether they handle household hazardous waste (HHW) and offer any special collection days when you can deposit the canisters. (In addition, a handful of national parks collect fuel canisters for recycling; the National Park Service recommends checking with the visitor center or your campground hosts.)
When disposing of your bottle, be sure that you’ve completely emptied the tank of all of its remaining gas. Attaching a tank to an open valve on your stove will burn off the final fractions of fuel, but be aware that the last bits of fuel and vapor leave the canister at a remarkably slow rate. Always keep the valve open—even after the flames have sputtered—for about a minute or two to ensure that any final vapor has escaped.
If you have a space where you can safely store a propane tank, you could 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. Not only are the 5-pound tanks refillable, but over time it’s cheaper to refill a reservoir with gas than to buy new disposable bottles.
Setting up a stove this way couldn’t be easier (video): You attach one end of the adapter hose to the propane tank and hook the other end to the fuel inlet on your stove. Once that’s set, you open the cylinder valve on the tank and then ignite your stove the same way you would if you were using a disposable tank.
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, 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.
As we continue to explore other alternative cooker designs—including, should they become available, those using more environmentally friendly fuels and technologies—we’d like to look more closely at portable paella cookers, discadas, and the King Disc from RTIC (which appears to be either a copy or license of the FireDisc). We would also like to examine single-burner butane designs—similar to what you’d find at some Korean restaurants—such as the Kovea Cube and the Iwatani 35FW Butane Stove.
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 has been plagued by stock issues.
The Camp Chef Everest is, as far as we can tell, identical in every way to the Stansport Boulder 2-Burner, except the Everest’s igniter employs a push-button mechanism instead of a twist. During our testing period, this model fell apart when we shipped it back and forth between testers.
We tested one model with a built-in griddle, the Camp Chef Rainier, and it left us underwhelmed. Its dedicated burner took longer than 20 minutes to boil 6 cups of water on full, and its griddle pan was lethargic.
The GSI Outdoors Selkirk 540 Camp Stove has a design similar to that of the Coleman Triton and Classic. However, the igniter broke on the second try, and the stove produced lackluster results in our boil test. (It’s been replaced by the 540+, which we’ll look at.)
For the jaw-dropping price ($510) of the Snow Peak Double Burner Stove, it should be the best camping stove you can buy, or at least the most versatile. It is not. Although it’s made from excellent materials, this stove misses the mark. It requires two separate Isopro bottles to work; running it from a single larger tank, even with conversion valves, is difficult. On top of that, during our tests the legs and wind screen both felt unpleasantly insecure when we were cooking on the stove.
The TemboTusk Adjustable Leg Skottle Grill Kit has the lightweight, cobbled-together charm of good adventure gear. However, for the price ($435), we’ve concluded that most people are better served by our discada-style pick, the FireDisc. The TemboTusk—with three legs instead of the four of the FireDisc and a smaller overall cooking area—seems unstable and limited for family cooking. But if you want a lightweight discada pick for solo or couple adventures, this model may be a good choice.
This article was edited by Ria Misra and Christine Ryan.
Matt McKean, professional outdoor chef, interview
Matt Heid, How Do You Recycle a Used Stove Fuel Canister?, Appalachian Mountain Club, August 1, 2014
Gas Cylinders, California Product Stewardship Council
Kit Dillon is a senior staff writer at Wirecutter. He was previously an app developer, oil derrick inspector, public-radio archivist, and sandwich shop owner. He has written for Popular Science, The Awl, and the New York Observer, among others. When called on, he can still make a mean sandwich.
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Gas Stove Portable Wirecutter is the product recommendation service from The New York Times. Our journalists combine independent research with (occasionally) over-the-top testing so you can make quick and confident buying decisions. Whether it’s finding great products or discovering helpful advice, we’ll help you get it right (the first time).