Solo Hiking Cookware: Snow Peak Titanium vs Kovea Alpine Master
Camping · Published 2/27/2023 ·
Long hikes call for a proper meal.
Some hiking and trekking routes take more than a day to complete. To cover those stretches, you end up cooking and eating at designated cooking areas, campgrounds, or campsites along the way. Today I’d like to introduce a few pieces of cookware for solo trips.
Long hikes call for a proper meal.
Some hiking and trekking routes take more than a day to complete. To cover those stretches, you end up cooking and eating at designated cooking areas, campgrounds, or campsites along the way. Today I’d like to introduce a few pieces of solo cookware. The photo above is the Snow Peak titanium cookset combo. Hiking cookware tends to be tall, narrow cups with a small opening. But for a Korean, the real fuel — ramen!!! — is a pain to cook in something narrow, because it keeps boiling over. You wind up gauging the pot’s temperature with your bare hand while you fiddle with the flame…
The two pots stack flat on top of each other. A Soto WindMaster burner fits neatly inside.
The camera I bought recently is manual focus only, so the focus drifted a bit here. From the next photo on, I stopped the aperture down a little while shooting. Bear with me.
Tucked inside is the small but precious Soto WindMaster burner.
A lighter and the burner both fit inside the pot. A 130g gas canister technically fits too, but carrying it all together is such a hassle that I pack it separately.
The small pot handles one packet of ramen, and in the larger one a seasoned pro can cook two at once.
At a mountain shelter you usually only need to make one, so I generally just bring the smaller cookset. Titanium resists corrosion and is light. The one downside… it’s noisy while you’re walking.
Stacked together, it looks like this. Very tidy and neat — that distinctly Japanese sensibility really comes through.
Nesting the two like this is nice and clean, but again — it’s a little noisy on the move.
Up second… giving up a bit of weight savings, here’s my current favorite, the Coalma (Kovea Alpine Master).
It weighs a little more than you’d expect, but it has so many strengths that I bring it along.
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First off, there’s a single pot. It holds two packets of ramen easily, and you can heat up the instant rice no Korean can do without!!
It’s aluminum, with a sturdy handle and a design that keeps the broth from spilling even when you lift it by that handle. The Korea-friendly touches really are great.
The oddly shaped bottom — that structure is almost completely unaffected by wind.
I’m guessing the base was developed after MSR’s Reactor patent expired. It maximizes heat efficiency, so three minutes is enough to boil a liter of water. Anyone who’s done it knows that boiling a liter of water is no easy feat. It’s even harder on a windy, cold mountain ridge, in a corner of a shelter or at a campsite — and the Coalma knocks out that tough job in three minutes. The gas consumption, of course, is enormous.
And the pièce de résistance — the lid is actually a frying pan.
At a campsite, a slice of beef with a shot of soju makes for a truly lovely meal. The lid is, no joke, a frying pan. It’s even coated so nothing sticks, and it comes with a pot stand so you can use the frying pan.
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An even more unusual-looking burner.
Thanks to that burner, it drinks an incredible amount of gas and boasts serious firepower. It comes standard with a pot stand for using the lid-frying-pan, and it includes a part that grips the gas canister too.
These days the trend is ultralight gear — load up, attack the route fast, and get back down — for hiking and trekking. But I still remember how incredibly good the pork belly and duck tasted at the cooking area of Seseok Shelter on Jirisan. Every now and then, enjoying a national park over two days and one night, or three days and two nights, makes for a wonderful break. Pick cookware that suits your pack size and your fitness, and take your time enjoying it.
Thank you.
ps. These were shot with a Leica M11 and a Summilux 35mm f1.4, but I don’t have the skills yet, so the photos are a mess. I’ll keep working at it and post better shots.
#KoveaAlpineMaster #Coalma #SnowPeakTitaniumCookset #HikingCookset #CampsiteCookset #MinimalCookset
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