All The Cooking Gear We Use In Our Van (& Why)

Travelling as we do in a small Volkswagen California camper van, we have to be very careful about the amount of cooking equipment we carry with us. And indeed, over the years, the amount we carry has dropped.

But by being clever in the meals we cook - and therefore in the gear we need - we've settled more or less on a small number of pieces that nestle together, fit in one half of one of the cupboards in the built-in kitchen, and allow us to prepare a wide variety of meals. In this article, I'll talk you through everything we carry, with a peek into our cutlery drawer too!

Pressure cooker

This has been a revelation for a whole food plant-based diet. Because if you're going to replace meat, the thing you'll be replacing it with is beans and pulses, which it makes sense to buy dried, and which pressure cookers were practically invented to make light work of. What's more, if you're an athlete needing a lot of carbs, you're also going to want to cook rice and potatoes regularly. A pressure cooker lets you cook all of these things super-fast using far less gas and with far less mess than any other method.

What's more, it can be used as a one-pot approach to cooking things like chillies, chickpea curries, dals, and even quick pasta dishes where the pasta, water, and sauce all go together. It softens vegetables pretty much instantly, meaning no need to spend ages frying onions to get them soft. The uses go on and on.

For a camper van, you need a small one, and it's worth mastering the pressure cooker at home with a larger model if you can before attempting to use a smaller one. But once you've got the hang of it - and it doesn't take too long - it's an indispensable centrepiece. Catherine Phipps can teach you all you need to know about pressure cooking.

Small pan and lid

The pressure cooker can, of course, be used like a normal pan, but a second pan with a lid allows you to augment a meal with extra vegetables, do things like cooking porridge, and also provides a useful place to 'store' one half of a pressure cooker meal. For instance, you could cook the rice, put it in a pan, put it to one side, and then quickly cook the second part of the meal in the pressure cooker. Because everything happens quickly, there's no need to reheat when you do this. We've got one that doesn't have a handle - it just has two small metal handles, which makes it easy to store.

Kettle

We have a very small camping kettle that's enough to make cups of tea but also lets you boil water more efficiently, which is useful when pressure cooking. Sometimes when pressure cooking, it's easier to add boiling water than boil it inside the pressure cooker with the food, because it gets everything up to pressure quicker and makes it less likely that food will stick.

A stove-top coffee pot

These are dirt cheap, last forever, and make coffee that, apart from espresso, is the best you're going to get. Takes less than five minutes in the morning and gets used multiple times every day before midday.

Utensils

Across in the cutlery drawer, we have a wooden spoon, a silicone spatula (for getting every last bit of food out of pans), a hard plastic spatula, a single very sharp cook's knife, a portable knife sharpener for that knife, a garlic press (which I consider to be a luxury item, but we eat so much garlic it really does save time), a pair of kitchen scissors, and a Swiss Army knife with a bottle opener, can opener, and so on. A small wooden chopping board tucks in with it all. And finally, two square airtight food containers that nestle inside each other for keeping uneaten food in.

And that's it. With what I've just described, we can cook all the meals we regularly want with enough variety to keep us interested. And again, it all centres around the pressure cooker - the one item here that we'd really be lost without.