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If you’re a regular car camper, a camp cook set is a smart investment. Sure, you can always take your household pots and pans on the road with you in a pinch, but they aren’t particularly compact and the outdoors can be rough on cookware. Camp cookware like the Quechua Camp Cookset, on the other hand, is built tough, packs down small, and lives with the rest of your camping gear, ready to go at a moment’s notice.

So yea, camp cookware is great, but most good sets share a common problem: They’re expensive. It’s tough to justify dropping $100+ on a set of pots, pans, plates, and cups, especially when you’ve already got most of these things handy at the house and can easily supplement what you’re missing with disposable plates, cups, and cutlery. The Quechua Camp Cookset caught my eye because it looks high quality and well designed, yet costs roughly half as much as the competition. Here’s my take after a few trips with the Quechua kit.

The Quechua Camp Cookset is a compact cook set with everything you need to cook for and feed up to four people. The set includes a large 2.6-liter non-stick cookpot, an 8″ non-stick frying pan, a heat-safe table mat, a lid (with a built-in strainer) that fits over both the pot and pan, and four sets of plates, cups, and cutlery.

That’s 24 pieces in total, and all 24 of them securely nestle together inside the cookpot for easy transportation and storage. As an added bonus, the plates and cups (or bowls, depending on how you want to use them) are color-coded, so it’s easier to keep up with who’s using what dish.

By combining a sizable cookpot with a non-stick frying pan/skillet, the Quechua Camp Cookset gives most campers all the cookware they need to make a meal on a traditional two-burner camping stove.

Everything inside the cook set is stackable and compact, so the entire kit only takes up about 3.5-liters of space in your travel bin or organizer of choice. Both the pot and pan are made from 304 stainless steel, but Quechua also added a double-layer aluminum base to both items, which improves heat transfer for faster cooking (and also saves you fuel in the process).

Quechua (and their parent company Decathalon) are a France-based outdoors brand that’s relatively unknown here in the states but has actually been in the business for the better part of 50 years. In my experience, their products strike a great balance between quality and price, and the Quechua cook kit is no exception there. Here are some of the most common questions I could find to test in the field:

Quechua claims their products are designed for use over any heat source, be it electric, gas, or wood fire. With that being said, you’ll want to be mindful when using the pot over a large open flame like a campfire, as its grab handles are made from heat-resistant (not to be confused with “fireproof”) polymer that will melt if exposed to direct flame. Best stick to cooking over a bed of coals, or putting some space between your pot and the flames.

Quechua uses Xylan (a non-stick polymer originally developed by DuPont) for their non-stick coating, which is tougher than traditional Teflon coatings, but still isn’t completely scratch-proof. I recommend sticking with wood, plastic, or silicone utensils for cooking if you want your coating to last.

After using the Quechua cook set on a few weekends’ worth of camping trips, I think it’s well worth the money. The main point of a camp cook set is having a separate set of pots and pans for outdoor cooking, and both the pot and pan in this kit are high quality.

You’ll miss out on some high-dollar features like premium cups, larger pots, and multiple lids, but if you don’t really need them to begin with, why spend the money? Personally, I don’t get much use out of “camp cups” anyway (an insulated coffee mug and a Nalgene are always in my gear bins), and a cast-iron skillet is just too versatile to leave at home if we’re going camping. The Quechua kit nails the essentials while serving its purpose of keeping disposable plates and utensils out of landfills, and does it for half the cost of the competition.

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