Sometimes, especially when you’re wild camping, it’s not possible to stop off at a pub or stroll along to a nice café to get your food. Even if you’re parked up at a campsite with its own eating places, you may not want to pay their prices, or you may want a little more variety.
We know from talking to first-time buyers that a lot of people still believe that cooking in a campervan doesn’t get better than beans on toast (not that there’s anything wrong with that), but we’ve taken that into account in our state-of-the-art campervan designs. Equipped with fridge-freezers and gas hobs as standard, we also offer air fryers and even integrated microwaves, making cooking in the campervan kitchen easy.
There are still some things to keep in mind, of course.
Campervan Cooking Tips
- Nobody likes washing up late at night, and nobody likes waking up to a lot of washing up to do before everything can be packed away. So whatever you do, plan meals that don’t need too many pans. This is somewhere the air fryer in our Transit campervan conversion really shines.
- By the same token, meal prep makes mess – peelings, offcuts, dirty knives and spoons. Think about what meal prep you can do when you have plenty of time.
Maybe that means pre-chopping the veg for your stir fry before your trip and freezing it, maybe it means doing the complicated prep for your evening meal after breakfast, before you head out for the day. - Think about the difference between bought sizes and portion sizes. A tin of eight hot dogs might be more than you need for lunch, but the excess can be set aside and chopped up into a one-pot pasta for the evening. (In our Renault Trafic campervan and our VW Transporter campervan, the double gas hob means you’re not limited to a one-pot pasta, either – but remember tip #1!)
- Clean quickly on the road and sterilise as part of your unpacking at the end of the trip. Maintaining food hygiene standards is enough to keep you safe and let you look around the campervan without seeing a mess – but you’ll want to follow up the way you would in your home kitchen once that’s done!
- Meals featuring fish are usually popular, but nobody loves the lingering smell after cooking fish. The same is true for a number of other delicious-in-the-moment meals. Think carefully about your options to ventilate any lasting aromas when you’re planning your meal choices.
- They aren’t necessary, but two things you could consider bringing if storage allows are a standing BBQ grill or a slow cooker. Both of them open up plenty of options.
- If you’re wild camping, give some thought to how you dispose of your used washing-up water. Be mindful to protect the environment.
