The camp kitchen box: what actually earns a spot after two years on the road

Somewhere around Emerald, Queensland, I stood at a dump point and threw out a $70 collapsible silicone kettle. It leaked at the seam, it never actually collapsed back down once it had been hot, and it had been dead weight in the camp kitchen tub for four months before I admitted defeat. That bin is where a lot of camp kitchen gear goes to die, usually after a caravan show or a "must-have" list from someone who's done a week away, not two years.

We've been on the road long enough now, two kids and a dog, that the camp kitchen box has basically sorted itself out by attrition. Stuff that doesn't get used gets left at the last caravan park bin or handed to whoever's camped next to us. What's left is a short list, and it's nowhere near as exciting as the catalogues make it look. If you're kitting out a camp kitchen for family touring, this is the honest version, not the aspirational one.

The box itself matters more than what's in it

We run a hard plastic tub with a hinged lid, roughly 55 litres, and it lives in the tunnel boot. Not a canvas roll, not a cute wooden crate. With kids, the camp kitchen gets kicked, sat on, and used as a step stool to reach the annexe zip. It needs to survive corrugations too — if you've read our piece on why washboard roads shake rigs apart, you'll know loose gear in a tub rattles itself apart on the Oodnadatta just as easily as anything bolted to the chassis. A tub with a lid that actually latches means the eggs don't end up wearing the cutlery.

I'd also argue against the multi-tier folding kitchen stands with the fabric pockets everyone was selling a few years back. Ours lasted eight months before the legs went wonky on uneven ground, which, let's be honest, is most free camps. We went back to a folding aluminium table and the tub sits on the ground or the tailgate. Less to break.

Cooking gear that survived two years

The two-burner gas cooktop is non-negotiable and it's the one thing that hasn't changed since day one. We run it off a 9kg gas bottle mounted on the drawbar, and I do the maths on litres and cooking days the same way I do water, which I've written about separately if you want the actual numbers behind camp kitchen water use per day.

What's actually stayed in the tub:

• One cast-iron skillet, seasoned, that does bacon, toasties and reheats. Heavy, yes, but it doesn't warp and the kids can't dent it.
• A single decent chef's knife and a cheap serrated one for bread, both in a blade guard, because a loose knife in a tub with two kids reaching in for the tomato sauce is asking for a trip to the nearest hospital.
• A billy, because a jug or kettle that only boils water is one job too few. Tea, pasta, blanching veggies for the dog's dinner, all the same billy.
• Two chopping boards, one for raw meat, one for everything else, colour-coded so a seven-year-old can tell them apart.
• A dedicated tub of salt, pepper, stock powder and olive oil that never gets unpacked from the van, refilled from bulk stock at home.

That's it for cooking. No pizza oven, no camp toaster, no jaffle iron in our case, though plenty of families swear by the jaffle iron and I won't argue with them.

Water and washing up is where families overpack

This is the bit I see go wrong constantly at caravan parks. Families turn up with three different washing up basins, a draining rack, dish soap, hand soap, and a separate container for "grey water" that never gets used because every caravan park bathroom sink does the job fine. We run one collapsible silicone basin (genuinely useful, unlike the kettle), one bottle of concentrated dish soap, and a scourer. Dry with the same two tea towels we rotate through the wash bag.

Where we do carry extra water capacity is for free camps without town water, and that's a separate conversation to camp kitchen washing up. If you're weighing up whether to carry more in tanks versus jerry cans for exactly this reason, I've gone through the actual trade-offs in water tanks vs jerry cans — not duplicating that here, but it's the next logical read if your camp kitchen setup is forcing bigger water decisions.

What got binned, and why

Beyond the silicone kettle, the casualties were mostly gadgets sold on convenience that fail on durability. A battery-powered can opener died from grit in the gears within a month; a $5 manual one from the local IGA has outlasted three trips. A "compact" four-piece knife block took up the volume of a shoebox for knives we used once. Disposable bamboo cutlery, bought with good intentions for the "eco" angle, went soft and snapped inside a week of actual use, and we went back to a set of cheap stainless cutlery from a discount store, six of each, no drama.

The other big one: a two-burner cooktop with a wind shield built in. Sounds smart. In practice the shield trapped heat against the regulator hose and we had one uncomfortable moment at a free camp near the Murray where the hose got warmer than I liked. We went back to a simple open cooktop and just park with our back to the wind, which, incidentally, is also better practice near the van generally — an open flame near an annexe wall in a strong breeze is not something you want to be managing at 6pm while the kids are underfoot.

What two kids actually add to the box

This is where our camp kitchen differs from a couple travelling without kids. We carry unbreakable melamine plates and cups, four of each, because someone always drops one. A dedicated snack tub lives at the top of the box so little hands can grab it without rifling through the knives. And I pack a second chopping board specifically so a kid can "help" cut soft fruit without needing the good knife anywhere near them.

We also carry a plastic tablecloth clip set, the kind with the elastic corners, because a gust of wind taking the tablecloth (and the dinner on it) off the table at a windy site like Streaky Bay Foreshore Tourist Park is not a hypothetical, it happened to us there on a blustery evening and we lost a full pot of pasta to the dirt.

What I'd add if I was starting again

Honestly, not much. If I was kitting out from scratch I'd skip the trial-and-error phase on the folding kitchen stand and go straight to a simple table plus ground tub. I'd also buy the cast-iron skillet on day one instead of month six, because every lightweight non-stick pan we tried before it warped or scratched within a season of corrugated roads and camp stove use.

The other thing I'd do differently is weigh the tub. It's easy to let a camp kitchen box creep past 15kg once you've added "just one more thing" a dozen times, and that's payload you could be using elsewhere. If payload creep across the whole van is something you haven't audited lately, it's worth a proper look, because the camp kitchen tub is rarely the only culprit.

The short version, if you want to skip straight to packing

Two-burner gas cooktop, one cast-iron skillet, one good knife plus one cheap serrated, a billy, two chopping boards, a collapsible silicone basin, concentrated dish soap, unbreakable kids' plates and cups, and a hard tub with a latching lid to put it all in. That's the box that's survived the Bruce Highway, the high country roads near Wonnangatta, and more windy caravan park kitchens than I can count. Everything else we tried along the way is either in a bin somewhere between Sydney and Cairns or sitting unused in a shed.

— Kellie Nguyen, Family Touring & Parks Editor, Conquer Australia