How a Bad Campsite Dinner Led to a Better Stove

The night I decided our old stove had to go, we were forty minutes from the nearest gas station and the rain was just starting to pick up. That disaster is the reason we now own a Gas One double burner stove, but it took a fully ruined dinner and a soaked picnic table to get us there.

I had a pot of corn going cold on one side of the old stove because the other burner had already died back in the spring, and I'd never bothered to replace the whole unit over one bad burner. So everything got cooked in sequence, one pan at a time, while three hungry kids sat at the table asking how much longer it would be.

That night it was chicken thighs. I had them going in a skillet, and by the time the corn was done and the potatoes were done and everyone had a plate in front of them, the chicken had been sitting off direct heat long enough that the middle wasn't fully cooked through. I caught it before anyone bit into it, but only because I cut one open to check, out of habit more than suspicion. We ended up eating cold sandwiches by headlamp while I recooked the chicken from scratch, and by then the drizzle had turned into the kind of steady rain that soaks through a jacket in ten minutes flat.

I remember standing under the picnic table's little rain shadow thinking, this isn't a camping problem, this is a gear problem. A one-burner stove means you cook in shifts. Everything comes out at a different temperature, and on a bad weather night there's no room for that kind of delay when kids are cold, wet, and done waiting.

So the following week, before our next trip was even booked, I started actually reading about double burner stoves instead of just replacing what I had with the same thing again. I wanted two full burners that could run at the same time, real folding legs so it wouldn't wobble on uneven picnic tables, and something that wouldn't quit on me again after one season of regular use.

I ended up circling back to a name that kept showing up in the comments on camping forums: Gas One. I'd seen their double burner stove mentioned as the budget pick that didn't feel like a budget pick, so before buying I went and read a full season of notes on it in our long-term Gas One review, plus the more blunt version in our honest Gas One review, and I compared the numbers against a couple of higher-priced options in our Gas One vs. Coleman Triton breakdown before I let myself hit buy.

Two burners means two things happen at once instead of one thing happening twice as slow.

The Gas One stove showed up about a week before our next trip, and the first real test wasn't dinner, it was breakfast. Eggs on one burner, bacon on the other, coffee pot moved over once the bacon was done. That's a normal weekend morning for most families, but it had never actually been possible for us before without one item going cold while the other finished cooking.

By midseason the Gas One stove had become the thing I set up first at every site, before the tent even, because I knew dinner planning didn't have to be a math problem anymore. Both burners lit reliably, even with a light breeze coming off the lake, and I never once had that flickering, about-to-die feeling I used to get with the old single burner on a windy evening.

One thing I never do, no matter how cold or wet it is outside, is bring the stove into the tent or any closed-in space to cook or to warm up. Propane stoves burn oxygen and put off carbon monoxide, and a tent doesn't vent that away fast enough to be safe. It stays out on the picnic table or a stable camp table, always in open air, under a rain fly or awning at most, never zipped inside canvas or nylon.

We also learned to plan meals around having two burners instead of pretending we still only had one, which sounds obvious but took us a couple of trips to actually apply. Side dishes and mains finishing together changed how much everyone at the table actually enjoyed the meal, instead of the person who cooked last eating a lukewarm plate while everyone else had already moved on to s'mores.

By the end of that season we'd cooked full sit-down dinners at camp more times than I can count, and I wrote up the actual step-by-step version of how we plan those meals in how to cook full meals at camp with a stove, because the stove is only half of getting a hot dinner on the table on time.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If you asked me over coffee whether it's worth upgrading from a single burner, I'd tell you the same thing I tell anyone who asks after a trip: it's not about cooking anything fancier. It's about not standing in the rain at nine at night recooking chicken while your kids eat cold sandwiches by headlamp. That's the whole case for it. The Gas One stove didn't change what we cook at camp, it just let us cook it like a normal dinner instead of a relay race where somebody always eats last and eats cold.