We’ve been looking for a lightweight cooker to take away when camping. We did try a single burner, one of those butane ones; the real cheapies with the plastic cover, but that really was quite limiting, and it really didn’t do what we wanted it to.
We have an older 3 burner camping cooker, but the flame on those isn’t very adjustable. It’s pretty heavy, and you can’t possibly put three pots on it, even though it’s got three burners. It has a problem of not having enough space for larger fry pans and things like that. And the worst thing about it is the wind guards. They’re hopeless, it has a lot of gaps, and it just doesn’t work very well.
We need to have something lightweight, with a good flame adjustment, 2 burners, and the option of using a small £1.00 gas canister or the larger 4K or 9K gas bottles is what we were after. We ended up with this Coleman Triton Series 2.
The difference from Series 1 to Series 2 appears to be the addition of a piezo automatic lighter, better flame adjustment, and a new clip to hold the case shut. The model I saw in the Camping store had a barbecue plate on top. And around about $100, it seemed like great value. It wasn’t until I got the Coleman Triton Series 2 home and saw the fine print that I found out. The barbecue plate was an additional extra.
This added about another $40 to the price, but I wanted to be able to use it as a small barbecue, so I really didn’t have many options but the pony up the money and order one. The barbecue plate fits inside the cooker when it’s folded up, and it’s also lightweight. So overall, I guess the $140.00 price tag isn’t all that bad. We’ve already cooked a couple of T-bone steaks on the barbecue plate. And there was quite a bit of wind around, and we found that the wind guards did a perfect job and the flame didn’t flicker or go out a lot of gas cookers.
Even the Council barbecues just don’t get hot enough to cook a steak properly, and you end up with something limp and soggy rather than a nicely browned piece of meat. No such problem with the Triton. However, each burner puts out 11,000 BTU, and that’s plenty of heat to cook a steak to perfection. The good thing is that Coleman Triton Series 2 can also be adjusted to give a small flame for simmering. And the Wind Guard works well enough so that the flame does not get blown out easily. The piezo lighter is nice to have just in case you forget to take a packet of matches camping with you. We always try to take some anyway, but it’s nice to have the lighter just in case we forget.
The barbecue plate is relatively thin but appears to be strong, and the nonstick coating makes cleaning it very easy. The splash guard on the cooker also helps to keep oil and splatter out of the main unit. There is a carry handle of sorts on the underside of the cooker, and although I think it could be a little better, it does the job OK. It’s good to have a gas hose included that allows you to connect directly to a four or 9K gas bottle. You can connect to the small Coleman 1LB gas canisters if you’re travelling light. We get to discover how long they last, but I’ve heard other people say that they will last up to an hour with the burners on high.
If that’s the case, they don’t last near long enough, but we’ll only be able to confirm that once we start using the unit a lot more. The attachment on the side of the Coleman Triton Series 2 that includes a gas regulator looks rather odd. And you would probably have to be careful not to put any undue stress on it. But it works well despite the odd appearance.
Well, what about problems and changes?
The first and probably most crucial problem is the cooker slipping when you try to light it. Pushing the piezo lighter puts pressure on the unit and tends to slide backwards very easily.
Secondly, there’s a lack of any kind of height adjustment underneath. So if you’re cooking on uneven surfaces, you have to find something else to slip underneath to level it all up. Coleman could easily and cheaply solve both these problems by adding small screws and rubber feet underneath the unit.
Unfortunately, as you just saw, the cooker has no gripping underneath it and will move very quickly on a smooth countertop. One way to fix that is to take a bit of non-slip matting. You can just roll that up and stick it in the bag with the cooker. Or alternately, I guess what you could do is do a little bit of work underneath it and put some rubberized feet on the bottom of it, and I think eventually that’s what I might do with it. But just for the moment, we’ll use this non-slip matting and as you can see. It takes a fair bit of effort now to move it around.
And just pressing the lighter no longer makes it skate across the top of the counter. Initially, we thought we’d get away with some ultralightweight cooking gear, but that really turned out to be too small and not practical. So, what we’ve done? We’ve gone for one of these Audi cookware sets, and they fit together rather nicely in the box.
I think we’ll keep it in the box to protect it, and as a way of packaging it quite neatly, I’ll just show you what’s in there. So, we have a small pot. In a large deep cooking pot, we have a frying pan. Now the whole set was around about $50. They look pretty good with high-quality nonstick coating on them. We’ll see how it goes over time and for it to pack away neatly. I guess that’s an area of concern. In future, we’ll see just how durable these are. They look like some kind of plastic would probably be better if that was metal rather than plastic, but we’ll see how long that last. It’s pretty sturdy, so we will keep using these for some time before we report back on how durable they are.
And we’ll let you know how that goes. They’re pretty lightweight. The coated are probably some kind of aluminium alloy, and aluminium is not the best thing to cook in. Either for heat retention or health, but because they’re coated, the health side isn’t a significant concern, but you do not want to cook in bare aluminium pots.
The Coleman Triton cooker is reasonably wide and only has two burners. Now you’ll find a lot of the older style cookers will have 3 burners and still be the same width as this, which is ridiculous. You can’t use the third burner for a third pot. So, there’s only really any point in having two burners, and even with the wind guards closed right up, there’s no problem at all with fitting a decent-sized fry pan and the big pot on there, so we’re not going to have any issues at all doing our cooking as far as space is concerned.
On top of the cooker, there isn’t much else we can say about the cooker just yet, as it’s a new addition to our camping gear. But from what we’ve experienced so far, we like the unit. And would recommend Coleman Triton Series 2 to anyone looking for a reasonably priced unit.
You can, of course, buy a commercial bag to put your Coleman Triton Series 2 in, but we recommend you look around your local op shop, and you’ll probably find something there that’ll do the job just as well. We found this rather lovely bag. It is partially padded, so it’s good and thick and will protect the cooker. And everything you need will fit in one spot. And, of course, it wouldn’t be wrong to chuck a packet of matches in there, just in case the piezo lighter fails to work one day.
Thank you for reading, and I will update this review after I have used the Coleman Triton cooker for some time in the future.