Ways to make heat

Almost every recipe on this site assumes a single gas burner, because that is what most people have away from a kitchen. It is not the only option, and for some of this cooking it is not the best one.

There are two questions worth separating, because they get muddled constantly. The first is what a heat source is good at. The second is whether it can be used where you are. Only the second one is a safety question, and the answer divides these five into two groups with nothing in between.

The dividing line: does it burn something

Gas and charcoal burn fuel, so both produce carbon monoxide. Neither goes in a tent, an awning, a porch, a boat cabin or a van, ever, lit or cooling. That is not a caution to be managed with a window open. It is the thing that kills people in this country every year, usually a barbecue brought inside after cooking because it still felt warm. The full case is on its own page: carbon monoxide.

Electric grills, induction hobs and microwaves burn nothing, so they produce no carbon monoxide at all. This is the single biggest practical difference between the two groups, and it is the reason electric cooking is worth the trouble of a battery for anyone cooking in an enclosed space.

Everything below assumes you have settled that question first. Wood fires, and what cooks who used them for centuries worked out, have a page of their own: cooking on an open fire.

What each one is good at

A single gas burner remains the default for good reasons: light, cheap, independent of everything, and fast to a simmer. Its weaknesses are wind, which a windshield mostly solves, and that it is one ring.

Charcoal gives more usable heat than anything else here for the money, and a wide hot surface rather than a point. It is genuinely better for flatbreads and for browning a quantity of onions properly. It is bad at anything needing timing or a low simmer, because it arrives late, peaks whether you want it to or not, then fades. The FSA’s readiness test:

make sure the coals are hot enough before you start cooking. They should be glowing red with a grey, powdery surface.

A gas barbecue is charcoal’s surface with a stove’s control, paid for in gas consumption and weight. For the cooking here it does little that a burner cannot, unless you are feeding more than about four people.

Induction is the best cooking experience of the five and the closest to a real hob. Its low-end control beats gas, which matters because much of this food is twenty minutes at a bare simmer, the thing camping burners do worst. Two catches: the pan must be magnetic, and it wants real power.

A microwave is not a cooking method here, it is a reheating method, and judged as that it is efficient. It is useless for the part that makes this food worth eating, which is building flavour in a pan.

The microwave number nobody quotes

A microwave sold as “800 W” is quoting cooking output, measured by heating a litre of water under IEC 60705. The power it draws from the supply is higher, because the magnetron and its electronics are not perfectly efficient.

For battery planning you need the input figure, which is on the rating plate inside the door frame or on the back, and is almost never in the product listing. Buying on the badge is how people end up with an appliance their battery cannot start.

What this costs to run

Gas and charcoal are consumables you carry. Electric costs watt-hours, and that arithmetic decides whether electric cooking is realistic for you at all. It is worked through in power for cooking.

The short version: an induction hob and an electric grill are among the most demanding things anyone tries to run off a battery, a microwave is far cheaper per meal than it looks, and a gas burner costs nothing electrically at all.

If you are cooking indoors during a power cut

This is the pantry case rather than the trip one, and it inverts the usual advice. With the mains off, the electric options are off too unless you have storage, and the temptation is to bring the barbecue in.

Do not. A camping gas stove used in a well ventilated room is a different proposition from a barbecue, but the honest answer is that the safest method in a house with no power is the one that needs no heat at all. A meaningful part of this corpus is designed that way, which is why no-cook recipes are filterable as a group rather than buried.