Kit

Around 20 people a year die of unintentional carbon monoxide poisoning in England and Wales, and 68% of those deaths fall in autumn and winter – the seasonal split is the “bringing it inside to keep warm” mechanism showing up in the statistics.

UKHSA advises taking an alarm when camping, because CO can enter a tent from a smouldering barbecue outside it. The full page is here and it carries no affiliate links, as none of the safety reference does.

Any alarm certified to the current standard will do. The cheapest one you will actually pack beats the best one left at home.

Fuel planning is the thing most trip cooking gets wrong. A 230 g canister is roughly an hour of hard boiling, and boiling is the expensive operation – which is why dried beans are so much more costly than they look once you count the soak and the thirty-minute boil, and why boiling water for treatment is the method with the highest running cost.

Buy the fitting your stove takes and check it, because screw-thread and clip-on are not interchangeable and discovering that on a hillside is a bad evening.

A chimney kettle burns twigs and boils a litre or so in a few minutes. For anyone treating water by boiling on a long trip, it removes the single largest fuel cost from the gas budget entirely.

Bulky, sooty, and needs dry fuel and somewhere you are allowed a fire, so it is a complement to a gas stove rather than a replacement. Never use one inside a tent, awning or van – see carbon monoxide.

Nearly every recipe here is one pan and one burner. What you want is a pan that is wider than it is deep, because a narrow pan scorches in the middle, and a lid that actually seals – the rice method and the couscous method both depend on trapping steam off the heat.

Non-stick makes washing up possible with a cup of water, which on a trip is a bigger consideration than it sounds.

Most of this site assumes one burner, because that is what most people actually cook on away from mains. A remote-canister stove with the burner separate from the gas is more stable under a full pan than a screw-on top mounted one, which matters more than raw power.

Simmer control beats maximum output for this kind of cooking. Almost everything here spends twenty minutes at a low simmer and about thirty seconds on full.

A site whose entire premise is tinned food should say plainly that a bad tin opener ruins a trip, and that the tiny folding military-pattern ones are miserable to use for more than about two tins.

Carry a proper one and a spare. Also worth knowing what to check before you open anything: a dented or bulging tin is a different decision from a sound one.

Wind is the main reason a stove that boils a litre in four minutes at home takes eleven in a field. A folding foil shield costs very little and routinely cuts fuel use by a third.

Do not enclose the burner completely, and never use one with a stove indoors. Restricting airflow around a flame is exactly the condition that produces carbon monoxide, and that page is the one on this site about something that kills quickly.

Ordinary chlorine and iodine tablets kill bacteria and viruses but, per NaTHNaC, parasites like Cryptosporidium and Giardia “are not always destroyed by these products”. That is the gap that catches people, because Cryptosporidium is exactly what upland British surface water offers.

Chlorine dioxide is a different product despite the similar name – the CDC has it killing Giardia and “somewhat effective” against Cryptosporidium, while still advising you filter first. Read “somewhat effective” as narrowing the gap rather than closing it, and see the water page.

Useful precisely because it packs flat when empty, which is the situation it spends most of its life in. Good for walking a refill back from a tap.

Not a primary container. The seams are the failure point and they fail when full, which is the worst possible moment and usually inside something.

Water is a litre per kilogram, which makes it the heaviest thing you carry and the figure most trip planning forgets. A 10 litre container is 10 kg, and dried food only saves weight when water is free – see the arithmetic on the rehydration page.

Rigid containers for the main store, because collapsible ones fail at the seams and always at the worst moment. Food-grade, with a tap if it is going to live in one place.

The number that matters is the absolute pore size. Per the CDC, a filter needs 1 micron or smaller to remove parasites and 0.3 micron or smaller for bacteria – and no filter removes viruses, which are smaller than any of it.

That is why filtration alone is not complete treatment, and why the order is filter first and then disinfect. The water page sets out which gap each method leaves; it is worth reading before choosing, because the three methods fail in different places and the differences do not overlap.

Decanting is not tidiness, it is what makes dried food keep. A part-used bag of lentils rolled shut lets in air and moisture, and damp is what turns a cupboard staple into something that will not soften however long you boil it – the rehydration page explains why old beans sometimes never cook.

Square beats round by a wide margin in a van locker: round containers waste roughly a fifth of the space between them. Buy fewer, larger ones than you think, and check the seal rather than the marketing.

Glass, heavy, and worth it in a kitchen rather than a van. For spices, pulses and flour at home they are the best compromise between airtight and visible – and being able to see what you have is most of what makes rotation happen.

Not trip kit. A full glass jar in a moving vehicle is a bad idea, and the weight is indefensible once you are carrying it.

Condensation in a van is relentless and it is the enemy of every dried thing you own. A sealed crate for flour, oats, pulses and spices is the difference between a cupboard that works all winter and one that develops a smell in November.

Look for a rubber gasket and clips rather than a push-fit lid. Clear ones let you find things without unpacking, which sounds trivial and is not.

A cool box is a fridge only if it holds at or below 5°C, and almost nobody checks. Ice in the box feels like refrigeration and frequently is not – by the afternoon a lot of cool boxes sit in the teens, which is inside the range where bacteria grow rather than below it.

A few pounds of thermometer turns “probably fine” into a number. If it holds, normal food safety guidance applies and you can plan around leftovers. If it does not, you do not have a fridge and should cook to the meal instead. Either answer is worth knowing; the guess is not.

A sealed bucket is excellent storage and miserable to open. Gamma lids clip on once and then give you a screw top, which turns a long-term container into something you can actually get flour out of on a Tuesday.

This is the piece of kit that decides whether bulk storage gets used or resented. Buy them at the same time as the buckets rather than after six months of levering lids off with a screwdriver.

For anything going away for a year rather than a season. Mylar blocks light and water vapour in a way that a plastic tub does not, which matters because both are what degrade dried food in storage.

Worth being clear what they are for. Mylar is a barrier, not a preservative – it keeps dry things dry. It does nothing for anything that is not already shelf-stable, and sealing something damp inside one makes matters worse rather than better.

Used with Mylar, these remove the oxygen that causes fats to go rancid and insect eggs to hatch. That is a real extension on grains, oats and flour, which go off through oxidation long before they go off microbiologically.

One caution worth stating plainly, because the prepping corner of the internet is careless about it: removing oxygen creates an anaerobic environment, and for one organism that is help rather than hindrance. The vacuum-packing page covers why this is fine for dry goods and emphatically not a way to store anything moist.

We are going to be blunt about this one because the category usually is not. A vacuum sealer is not a preservation method. It removes oxygen, which suppresses the moulds and spoilage bacteria that would otherwise warn you something has gone wrong, and does nothing at all to the organism that grows without oxygen. Read the vacuum-packing page before you buy one.

What it is genuinely good for: keeping dry goods dry, compressing bulky things like pasta and oats into a shape that packs, and portioning. What it is not good for is making anything moist last longer outside a fridge.

If you want it for the first list, it earns its money. If you want it for the second, it will not do what you are hoping.