BUSH KITCHEN

At OTA we love camping kit that does double or triple duty and the Daymo Adventure-Q Kettle BBQ is one such item. It’s a lightweight cooker that can BBQ, bake and steam, with heat from a BBQ hotplate, gas or induction.

Pioneering pizza oven brand, Gozney, expanded its appeal to the outdoors community with the 2025 launch of its new product, Tread, that the company said was ‘the world’s most portable pizza oven’. 

OXO is a US-based award-winning consumer brand; best known for its household cooking ware and tools. The new OXO Outdoor range is aimed at campers.

There was a time when you had to forget the niceties of town life if you went bush – including smoothies for breakfast. Now, thanks to BlendJet’s portable blender, you can spin away.

Now part of the Brown and Watson International (BWI) Australian stable, which includes reputable brands Narva, Projecta, KT Cables, KT Solar and BOAB, National Luna fridges have been manufactured in South Africa for more than 30 years.

Off Track Wines is a new wine brand and the first in Australia to be created specifically with outdoor adventurers in mind. We checked out the new range and found it very much to our taste.

The clue for the purpose of this book is in the title that aims it at compact, not necessarily camping, kitchens. It also extols the undoubted virtues of home-made, lovingly prepared meals and that’s not always possible when camping – especially remote-area camping.

Portable fridges and coolers look much the same from the outside – they’re all insulated boxes with lids – but there are significant differences in the way they work and the type of energy they use. It’s necessary to know something about the ebbs and flows of the cooling business if you want to be sure of buying the right unit for your needs.

Clearview has released the world’s first patented aluminium powered fridge slide that has been developed and tested over three years. It’s available in four sizes – S, M, L and XXL.

We’ve checked out many different coffee makers over the years, but the best manual-pressure one we’ve used so far is the Nanopresso kit. With available accessories it can produce a single or double-shot ground-coffee or a single-shot Nespresso capsule coffee.

‘Packing everything but the kitchen sink’ was once regarded as poking fun at those who overpack, but with ARB’s latest release, it’s part of the normal camping package.

Space is always at a premium when it comes to loading your vehicle or camper. Pots and bowls that fit inside each other used to be as good as it got, but now there are collapsible pots, pans and ‘crockery’.

Electronics have crept into the camper fridge market. Our experience with one such fridge wasn’t great, but a fix was easy.

Not everyone has a portable fridge and those who do sometimes need additional cooler capacity. That’s why the portable icebox still has a place. We tested six of them in summer heat.

The Ice Mule range of soft cooler bags and back packs rewrites the soft-cooler concept, we reckon.

The Coleman Pack-Away Kitchen disappears into a compact case. The sides of the case open out to form the serving table top. The stove stand opens on one side of the table top and a slip-on cooking tool frame clicks in place to hold tongs, spoons and the like.

We’ve taste-tested the range of Happy Camper Gourmet pre-cooked meals and we don’t go anywhere without some of them in our food boxes. If our fridge packs up we won’t starve.

Tough and efficient mobile refrigeration gives bush travel a five-star touch, but you have to get the basics right.

We love our morning coffee and for years we struggled to find the best way to have espresso quality coffee in the bush. With our new Handpressos we’ve found it.

The stove is a clever design, the two round burners are separated by a rectangular burner and with all three alight and the griddle on top there’s even heat over the entire plate.

One of the greatest health risks in the bush is illness caused by poor hygiene. We have a camp rule that we never touch food or eating utensils without washing our hands.

Before you start filling your food containers for your next trip, you should be aware of what you can and cannot take across State borders and into special exclusion zones.

We hadn’t travelled with a water filter before, but after one trip using a Katadyn unit we wouldn’t go bush without one again.