(Don’t forget to treat your cast iron!) If you know you’ll use this stove and the cast iron grill and griddles, then it’s still a great buy. 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 coleman camp stove was lethargic. 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.
Browse Coleman’s top-rated backpacking and camp stoves and more. Trailspace’s community of gear reviewers has field-tested and rated the top liquid fuel stoves. The newer models burn dual fuel, but I’ve only owned the model that takes only white gas. Choosing the best camping stove for you starts with considering how big of a coleman camp stove group you usually camp with, how intricate of meals you usually make, and your budget. If you’re looking for one do-it-all, high-end stove for the whole family, I’d definitely recommend the Coleman Eventemp 3-Burner. But, if you just want something cheap, versatile, and reliable, you can’t go wrong with the Coleman Classic.
I’d highly recommend this grill to accompany a camping stove on a group trip. The small size and weight of the Triton stove made for easy storage and carrying. The Coleman Triton stove was my kitchen away from home for a 2,000 mile road trip through Oregon, Nevada, and California where my wife and I visited several National Parks and coleman camp stove Monuments. Every breakfast and dinner we had during those two weeks was cooked on the Triton’s two burners. Ravioli were boiled to perfection, eggs were made over easy, and sloppy joes were simmered for exactly 30 minutes as per the rules of my mama’s secret recipe. At the end of every circle, you find yourself back at the beginning.
The knob only has a half-turn range, which means you’ve got fairly limited temperature control. We wouldn’t choose it as our main camping stove or rely on it as our main source of power, but it’s not a bad addition to your camping gear. We omitted this stove from our simmer test because it was impossible to have any real temperature control or simmer function. With the fan on low, the flames do drop down considerably, but not nearly enough to hold water just below boiling. The lack of an auto ignition is another drawback, especially because the Explorer was basically impossible to relight without a long match or grill lighter. A typical camping lighter won’t work that well with this stove.
While the Coleman Classic isn’t fancy or feature-rich, it does everything you need a stove to do in a timely and proficient manner. It doesn’t have the highest BTUs or boiling times, but it has solid performance in terms of fuel efficiency. For the price, this little gem can satisfy a lot of campers. 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. If you can’t manage the extra weight, consider purchasing a refillable 1-pound bottle and kit from Flame King (pictured below).
It’s a very minor detail, but the stove isn’t moving with a rotary ignitor. Free-Standing – Free-standing stoves are a great option if tabletop space is limited. They also tend to be better suited for large groups than smaller tabletop stoves. Free-standing stoves typically use large propane tanks, so be prepared for these to take up a lot of space. The wind screens are virtually identical to the Classic, so we think its poor performance in wind is due to its slim design, which leaves the burners sitting higher and more exposed to the wind. The poor wind resistance also negated its faster boil time and exceptional simmer function, unless we were cooking in extremely calm weather.
The ability to use multiple fuels makes this stove quite valuable. In an emergency, it may be easier to find unleaded gasoline than Coleman fuel. Keep in mind that gasoline produces significant amounts of carbon monoxide, so do not use this stove indoors. The stove pictured has two burners which will each accommodate a 10 inch pot.