When it comes to camping stoves, the smaller, the better. No one wants to lug around a large gas burner when roaming the outdoors, after all. As such, it’s no surprise to see camping stoves get more and more compact. Despite that, we’re pretty amazed that the Katadyn Optimus Gemini II is able to fit dual burners in the small amount of space it takes up.
How compact is it? Well, it’s designed to pack into a narrow bundle that measures just 12 x 2.8 x 4.1 inches (length x width x thickness), allowing you to easily slip it inside your pack or even squeeze the whole thing in one of your bag’s exterior pockets. Suffice to say, it’s a very convenient size for a stove that will let you cook two different meals at the same time.
The Katadyn Optimus Gemini II is a two-burner camping stove that’s designed to collapse into a portable bundle for easily carrying inside your pack. Despite the small size, it’s a proper two-burner stove with enough spacing to fit a pair of pans and pots on top, allowing you to easily make coffee on a Moka pot on one burner and fry up some sausages on the other. Since the stove itself is so narrow, though, you’ll probably want to be careful handling pots and pans on this thing, making sure they’re properly balanced on the wireframe structures and holding them while stirring to avoid knocking the whole thing out of place. Yeah, that won’t be fun.
The burners are powerful, too, each one having a 17,000 BTU rating, so you can crank this up for high heat to do some serious cooking outdoors. How fast can it heat up water? Katadyn claims it can boil a liter of water in around four minutes, which is quite convenient for campsite use. Each of the burners has independent controls, as well, so you can run high flames on one and dial things down to a low simmer on the other. According to the outfit, the stove uses an innovative pressure control valve that ensures steady heating output from start to finish.
The Katadyn Optimus Gemini II has a low-profile design that will work best set up on a camping table, with wireframe legs for stability, so it should stay upright for the most part. Again, just make sure to properly balance any heavy cooking vessels you place on top, since this is a pretty barebones camping equipment. Despite that, it even incorporates a built-in wind shield, which it manages to do by surrounding the burners with about an inch of wall around them, so they can burn continuously without strong winds getting in the way.
At 1.7 pounds, this isn’t the lightest camping stove out there, but the compact size definitely makes it one of the most portable. Sure, you’ll still need to carry a gas canister with you, but that’s true with, pretty much, any propane stove for camping. According to the outfit, by the way, it can get around 160 minutes of burn time for a 450-gram gas canister, so it should let you do a whole load of cooking at camp.
The Katadyn Optimus Gemini II is available now.
