Motorcycle Touring Cooking Gear

If you plan to cook at your campsite, a cookstove is a must. Smaller is better, but the design you choose will depend to some extent on the kind of food you want to cook. To prepare freeze-dried food in plastic bags, all your stove has to do is heat water to boiling. More elaborate, multistage meals will require a more elaborate stove, or in some cases, two separate ones. Depending on the design of the stove, it can run on alcohol, propane, butane, white-gas, LPG, kerosene or the unleaded gasoline in your motorcycle’s fuel tank.

Most camping fuels are available in lightweight, compact canisters. They can also be purchased in bulk and transported in readily available aluminum flasks. An important factor to keep in mind is that food, fuel, water and all other necessary items can be replenished without difficulty, so unless you’re heading for the farthest remotes of the Himalayan’s outback, it’s not necessary to transport more than a liter of water or cooking fuel and several days’ worth of food at a time.

You do need to think about the cooking fuel customs in your target country, for example, most European camping sized cooking equipment is fueled by butane gas, while most cooking in a country like Thailand is done with LPG. A butane powered stove cannot be used with LPG gas without modifications.

You’ll need cookware, too, including cutlery and pots and pans. Get purpose-built backpacking cookware that “nests” – the pieces fit inside each other and take up no more room than the largest piece – for compact storage. Ditto for cutlery, and make sure it’s durable. Plastic cutlery isn’t much good for handling very hot food right out of the pot. And don’t forget biodegradable dishwashing soap for the cleanup. You visit nature, so be polite as much you can. And not forget, leave no trace, garbage needs to travel with you until you can dispose of it in a good way.