Just Another Cook Kit
The coffee cup does not stay in the pot. Every morning I've ever had on trail, I finish breakfast, start one more cup for the walk out, and that cup ends up sitting outside the cook kit while I break camp. It never gets nested back in. So the tidy little all-in-one package I packed at home is not the thing I'm actually carrying by 8 a.m.
That is the sort of detail you only learn by using the same kit for years, and it is most of why I finally made this video. There are already a few hundred cook kit videos on YouTube. My buddy and I talked about doing ours back when we were both talking about starting channels. He did his. Five years later, here's mine.
Products Mentioned In The Video
Gear I either showed, or just talked about.
The pot is the only piece that never changed
Everything else in this kit has been swapped at some point. The Toaks 750ml titanium pot has not. I also own the 900 and I think an 1100 somewhere, plus a few other Toaks cups, and I keep coming back to the 750. It just feels like the right size.
That is easier to say when you know what you're doing with it. I'm boiling water. Dehydrated meals, coffee, tea. I'm not simmering anything. If your cooking looks like mine, the 750 holds enough water for a meal and a cup, and it swallows the rest of the kit for storage.
The lid is the one sore spot. From what I hear, the original version of the piece I'm using nests down into the pot and works as a lid properly. This is the new model and it doesn't snap down, it just sort of sits there. I've looked around for the original and it's going for big money, mostly out of the UK. Maybe one day I decide to spend forty bucks on a lid. I haven't run this one in the field yet, so I'll report back.
Six stoves to end up with a cheap one
I've gone through about six stoves, and the reason is the same reason you probably have a drawer of them: you watch a video, somebody says this is the best stove, and you buy it.
The BRS 3000T is what's in the kit now. At $16.89 and 1.44 oz, the pitch is mostly the weight and the price. It boils water pretty quick, and for what I do that's the whole job.
You give things up. There's no igniter, so you need a way to light it. I carry the Exotac nanoSPARK for that, though you probably already have a lighter in your fire kit.
The stoves I moved away from were not bad stoves. I really like the Soto WindMaster, and I bought it for a real reason: wider legs that fold out, because I went through a phase of doing a lot more actual cooking on trail and needed something that would hold a skillet. I've also had the MSR Pocket Rocket 2 and a few no-name ones. When my cooking went back to boiling water, the reason for the fancier stove went away with it. I may do a separate video on the more involved trail cooking, because that is a different problem with different answers.
Mods, and which ones I'd actually defend
I added a temperature gauge so I can see how hot the water is. My thinking is that I don't need to run all the way to a rolling boil for most of what I do, so I can pull it early and save fuel.
The rubberized handle covers are the part I'll be honest about. They are not needed. A handkerchief or a bandana does the same job, and that's what I used for years. I got sucked into one of those "top three mods for your cook kit" videos, and now here I am making the same kind of video.
The 3D printed legs for the fuel canister are elastic and plastic, from Garage Grown Gear. Also not needed. They add a little stability under the stove and they're a nice add-on.
For wind, the common complaint about the BRS is that it has no shield. The Ocelot 4.2 from Flat Cat Gear assembles around the stove so the burner sits down between the panels. Full disclosure: I've never actually needed it. The last few trips I carried it and set it off to the side. It weighs next to nothing, so I want to have it, and I hope I never use it.
Rounding out the small stuff, the Toaks titanium folding spoon at 0.35 oz, a 4 oz fuel canister because the small ones drop right into the pot, and the hot lips that clips onto the rim so you can drink coffee out of titanium without burning your lip.
The coffee cup problem
For a long time my second cup was the GSI Outdoors ultralight cup. It's plastic with a sleeve that adds a bit of insulation, and it exists so I can get breakfast going and have coffee at the same time. That's a real quality-of-life thing in the morning.
It also means carrying an extra cup, and it does not nest with everything else. The Toaks pot packs so well that for years I threw the whole kit inside it, fuel included, and the GSI cup would not fit around that loaded pot. So it rode loose in the pack. Not a huge deal, except that a loose cup is a cup you can walk away from. Ask me how I know.
The all-in-one version has one advantage I still miss. On a day hike, a single self-contained container with fuel in it is hard to beat. Worst case I heat food, eat, then heat water for coffee after.
Two things I haven't tried yet
The pot cozy is a Toaks piece I picked up from Garage Grown Gear, and it fits the 750 well. The idea is a one-cup kit: leave the coffee cup home, keep the heat in the pot longer so the coffee lasts. I haven't taken it out yet. If I remember it, it goes on the next trip, which will be whenever it cools off here in Tennessee. It might get left behind, because it isn't the normal thing for me.
Same story with the new lid. Bought, packed, not yet proven.
That's the kit. Five years of small changes around one pot that never moved. If you've solved the second-cup problem in a way that doesn't involve carrying a second cup, I want to hear it.
