Cooking Outdoors - The DIY Kitchen Box - The Idea
Developing a DIY Kitchen Box for camping & overlanding which is made of robust material. This Box was tested in the wild & under harsh conditions. Here, I share my ideas and plans to build your own.
I love cooking — both indoors and out — though I enjoy it far more under the open sky. Inside, it often feels like the cleaning outweighs the fun. But outdoors, cooking becomes part of the experience: surrounded by nature, under clear skies, and sometimes using ingredients growing just nearby. Every meal feels more special out here — simple, grounded, and deeply satisfying.
Cooking while overlanding isn’t always as romantic as it sounds. You’re often dealing with:
- Wind, rain, and dirt
- Uneven ground
- No real work surfaces
- Nowhere to keep your gear dry or organised
And when it’s time to cook or clean, you need your setup to be:
- Portable, flexible, and fast to deploy
- Reliable — everything in one place, ready to go
That’s exactly why I built my own modular kitchen box: to make outdoor cooking easier, more enjoyable, and stress-free — no matter the conditions.
We have used the DIY kitchen box intensively during our family overlanding trip to the wild Pyrenees.
Combining natural ingredients with our meal, like rosemary and thyme that grew just next to our tent felt somewhat special and natural. Preparing food with less makes but with more natural ingredients makes it deeper and more complex than a dish from a gourmet restaurant where the ingredients come from far away.
The fun of cooking outdoors and the need for a practical solution for cooking, cleaning dishes and storing your equipment in a solid box while overlanding and offroading in rough terrain led me to develop my own DIY Kitchen Box. You can even cook in the dark ...
If you want to know more about the DIY Kitchen Box, its build process and the plans, stay tuned as I am working on a follow-up article describing in detail design, storage spaces and dimensions. This follow-up article will contain also a list of parts needed to build this Kitchen Box.
Sebastian Weiss
In the following video, I'll give you a quick tour of the DIY Kitchen Box setup.
Quality food means for me that it is organic and preferably locally produced or grown. Having veggies or fruits from far away means you cannot be certain about the circumstances it was produced, how the local farmer is compensated for their work, the environmental impact.
You can get a better picture of the origin of your food if you buy local. Noticing this vividly, was when I went to a local store, which I have linked in this article, is when I bought locally grown garlic from the Provence in France. It looked and it tasted so much better than the ones you can buy, it was huge & it was really spicy!
Access to clean, safe water is especially important when you're on the road. That's why I developed a portable pump case with multi-stage water filtration to produce clean, safe drinking water on the go!
Sign up for our newsletter and download the free pump case blueprint to learn more about the pump case and its premium components!
