My camp kitchen gear is often the bulkiest, most annoying stuff in my backpack. Pots are big. Stoves are weirdly shaped. Fuel canisters are always a pain. It’s taken years of experience for me to streamline a kit that packs as efficiently as it makes dinner. Especially when I’m camping on my own and don’t have a partner to split the system up with, having cooking gear that packs as small as possible is critical. But that suddenly got a whole lot easier: Jetboil’s Stash Cooking System was designed specifically for soloists or small groups moving fast and light, but who don’t want to sacrifice fast cook times.
For $135, the Stash system includes a 0.8-liter pot, along with a tiny collapsable stove and fuel stabilizer legs. The best part: The stove, legs, and a 100g canister of fuel nest inside the pot, making it easy to pack this self-contained system and not need to go digging to find individual pieces when you arrive at camp. Pull out the entire unit and you’re cooking. You can even tuck your lighter in the cavity at the bottom of your fuel canister, keeping that contained as well.
Packability Without Sacrifice
I took the set up with me on a couple short backpacking trips this summer, both in the Adirondacks, as well as Colorado’s San Juan Mountains. The system is my top choice for particular trips: Short ones with one to two people (a 100g fuel canister isn’t going to last you too much longer than that, cooking two times per day), where I’m keeping my cooking simple. Boiling water, cooking soups, or other easier tasks are ideal for the smaller pot—you’re not exactly going to cook pancakes in a pot this small. That said, the advantage the Stash system has over a typical Jetboil system is that the stove is more universal than one that needs to be married to a particular pot. So if you wanted to cook pancakes, you could easily carry an additional frying pan and set it on top of this stove. The burner is smaller than other better-suited stoves, though, so it’s still not the most ideal for more complex meals.
But when it comes to boiling water or heating up other liquids, the Stash is impressive: The pot features a protected “FluxRing” around the bottom, which spreads out the heat and keeps the boil time down to 2.5 minutes for a half-liter. A big valve makes it easy to fine-tune the stoves relatively impressive simmer control. In order to keep everything light, there’s no piezo igniter, so pack matches. The stove was also more susceptible to a breeze than the typical stove system, so think about keeping it better protected on breezy days.
The whole system packs inside the 4.4 x 5.1 inch pot with a lit (which features a hole for pouring through) and the pot and stove weigh a paltry 0.4 lbs, making them ideal for thru-hikers and ultralight enthusiasts. If you’re looking for one ultra-versatile camp cooking setup for small groups with a focus on being lightweight, the Jetboil Stash is about as good as it gets.
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