If you have ever gone camping with us, you know that we’re really big on food. Specifically, we’re big on eating well at camp. Not that eating well means we have to eat glutenous, high-calorie meals — eating well refers to our desire to make our camp kitchen an extension of our at home kitchen.

Camp with us and you’re likely to find yourself eating artisan tacos, Korean beef bulgogi, Thai chicken curry, a low country shrimp boil, or any number of other delish and complete meals. We’ve framed our cooking around our two methods of heating food - on our propane camp stove or our Tembo Tusk skottle.

That was, until now.

With the addition of our 12V auxiliary power system to the Jeep, new opportunities to expand our camp kitchen became available as we could now power additional cooking devices. If we so wanted, we could now power blenders, a sous vide, or other electronics with the help of an inverter. So we were naturally excited to try out the 12V travel oven from KickAss Products and to expand the camp feast options accordingly.

12 Volt Mini Travel Oven

The KickAss travel oven is a compact solution ideal for overland travel, trailers, van conversions, or car camping. Unlike your normal home toaster oven, the KickAss oven is designed to run on 12 volt electrical input — a standard cigarette lighter — which makes it easy to wire into an auxiliary power supply without requiring the use of an inverter.

Designed with the overland traveler in mind, the oven also stays cool to the touch on the outside, so you don’t need tons of cooling space or to keep it away from other gear for risk of fire. I will admit that I was very skeptical of the ability for this oven to stay cool even when heated to 350*F, but am happy to report that it was never more that mildly warm to the touch.

The oven comes pre-wired with an anderson style connector to attach to any existing power setup, and also includes a small dongle that mates for using a 12V cigarette style connector. Conveniently, that dongle also includes an inline fuse for safety. Although I could easily wire in an anderson style plug directly to the KickAss 170ah AGM battery that I am running, I instead opted to leverage the external cigarette socket I wired in to power the battery. This also allowed me to monitor the draw on the battery and record power requirements as I cooked.

The oven itself comes with two standard cooking racks and a set of mounts that allow you to attach the oven under a cabinet, shelf, etc. I don’t really have a place to under mount the oven in our rig, so we sat it atop our Goose Gear storage drawer system. We also cooked with it sitting on the flip-down tailgate table; both options were equally viable.

As an extra accessory, KickAss allows you to purchase a tray with removable inner shelf that is designed to fit perfectly inside the oven. The removable tray is handy to keep your food slightly raised off the bottom so as to prevent burning. The oven heats from the bottom and there’s no fan like a traditional convection oven, so you’re more likely to burn the cook if it sits directly on the bottom versus slightly raised up. At first I was a little skeptical of the value of this extra tray over the standard cooking racks. I use a toaster oven all the time at home and normally put food either directly on the rack, or in a shallow pan. The depth of the KickAss pan felt like overkill; however, in testing I have come to appreciate the generously tall walls. The pan is water tight (I tested it full of water for 24 hours and not a drop came out), so you can put a sauce-based or otherwise liquid-heavy meal into the oven and not worry about it sloshing out of the pan while you drive down the road (more on this later). Really, that small detail and consideration is worth the price of admission and evidence that this gear really is made by overlanders for overlanders.

A Dose of Patience Required

Before we get any further, we need to have a dose of expectation management. This is not a forced air oven or a toaster oven with a heating element like the one sitting on your counter. As a result, it takes significantly longer to heat up than the average oven you are used to working with, and that’s perfectly fine — if you plan for it! To get to the maximum temperature, you should budget at least an hour of time — maybe less on a hot day or more on a cold one. This is part of the trade-off for having a 12V oven that doesn’t get super hot on the exterior, so you just need to adapt and plan for that extended heat-up.

The easy solution here is to heat the oven and/or start your cook before you arrive at camp. With the aforementioned tall tray for the oven, you can put a meal in and still bounce over the most bumpy trails and not worry about dinner spilling. That’s pretty awesome.

I did find the extended heat up to be a little bit of a downer for breakfast; I’m not willing to wake up earlier and there’s something to be said for the speed and ease of tossing bacon in a pan. For that reason, going forward I’ll probably use the oven for cooking lunch and dinner more often than breakfast.

Cooking with the KickAss Travel Oven

Using the KickAss travel oven is about as easy as it comes - there’s a knob for temperature and a knob for cooking time. To start the oven, plug it in and turn the temperature knob to the desired setting. The temp knob isn’t labelled with exact temperatures — but KickAss advertises the max temp is around 350*F and the minimum is around 200*F, so a little approximating will get you dialed in. I did a little test with a probe thermometer in my house before using the oven on the trail and found those min and max temp ratings to be pretty close to accurate in my specific oven.

The oven has a secure latch designed to keep the door closed for offroad travel and for heat retention. There is no light or window, and the oven does cool off when the door is opened, so best to avoid peeking at your cook and try to keep the door closed for the length of the cook.

The built-in timer can run for up to 120 minutes, offering enough time for virtually any cook shy of a full Thanksgiving turkey!

Power Consumption

KickAss advertises that the oven draws 10.8 amps; however, my testing showed it drew closer to 9.4 amps during heat-up. Assuming my 170ah KickAss AGM battery is fully charged, even if I don’t want to drain more than half the battery in order to preserve battery health, I could run the oven for over 8 hours before I would have the battery at low power. That’s pretty incredible, because there isn’t much I could think to cook on the trail for a full day!

In my testing, we had a cook that lasted 90 minutes and it pulled around 12 amps from the battery — pretty dang good!

Food Critic’s Verdict

None of this conversation really matters at the end of the day unless the food created by the KickAss travel oven was worth eating! Who cares how great the power consumption is if the food tastes like rubber, right?

If you have planned for the slower heat-up period of this oven and aren’t in a rush to eat immediately, this oven has tremendous potential for making delectable meals on the trail. Personally I would probably lean more towards using it for reheating, warming, or cooking frozen foods than I would raw. The slow warming time would make it hard to cook a raw piece of chicken, for instance, without some added overhead and logistics. But if I had pre-cooked chicken that just needed to be warmed without being re-cooked, this would be a fantastic tool for the job.

Alternatively, with a little trial and error, you might be able to use the oven as a modified slow cooker. The average slow cooker (crock pot) temperature range falls within the range this oven can cook at, so you could probably load a roast or other slow cook meal in the morning and have the oven cook all day (remembering of course that the timer max is 120 mins, so you’d occasionally have to reset the timer). This would work best in a scenario where your car alternator is charging your aux battery while you drive (KickAss DCDC charge controller anyone?), allowing you to essentially run the oven indefinitely without draining the battery. Again, I didn’t test this, but it should be within the realm of the possible. If you do test it, leave me a comment and let me know how it went!

Recommendation?

Getting a skottle totally changed the way we cook on the trail. Likewise, I think the KickAss travel oven will change our trail meals forever. Just having the oven has caused me to re-think what is and is not possible on the road in terms of cuisine, and now it’s a matter of experimenting to discover new techniques and recipes. The big difference is that the skottle is already really popular in the US (as is a traditional propane camp stove), but there aren’t as many people using 12V travel ovens to cook on the road. As a result, there are fewer ready-made recipes and those of us diving into the travel oven now will be innovating and paving the way with how to adopt this for new meal ideas.

Would I recommend the travel oven? The answer to that has a few more caveats than my recommendation, say, for the KickAss DCDC controller. If you are hoping this will act like a traditional home toaster oven, then it’s not the product for you. Likewise, if you are super tight on space, it’s a fun addition to the camp kitchen but not an absolute necessity.

However, if you have the space and can plan around the heat-up time and cook time for this oven, then it’s a fantastic bit of kit and certainly opens a bunch of new doors for creative meals on the go. I am excited to experiment with adapting it like a modified slow cooker and using it to reheat leftover meals. In the coming years, I expect to open that door and bask in the wafting of smells that emanate from my freshly cooked dinner — and I’ll be sharing it all with you on Instagram (consider yourself lucky that it’s not scratch & sniff photos yet!)

What Could Be Better?

No product is perfect, and there are a few things I’d like to see on the next iterations of a travel oven. First, it’d be nice to have temperatures annotated on the dial, rather than just a 'Min’ and ‘Max’ value. While that makes it easier to sell to an international market that uses Fahrenheit and Centigrade, it also puts the onus on me to remember the temps for high and low. I’ll probably use my label maker to mark those temperatures for future reference so I don’t need to recall them.

Second, I’d love to see the optional tray that is available for the oven come with a non-stick coating. To date I’ve wrapped it in foil every time I wanted to use it for ease of cleanup at camp; a non-stick coating would certainly make camp cleaning a little easier.

Finally, and this is more of an FYI than improvement — plan to clean out your oven when it arrives before use. It does come wrapped in foam and plastic bags that left a little bit of a residue on the trays, so you should wash that really well before you cook on it just to make sure no manufacturing byproducts are left behind.

Where to Buy

If you want to grab this oven and tray for your own overland rig, check out the KickAss Products USA website to order directly from them:

KICKASS 12V TRAVEL OVEN

Questions?

Anything we forgot to cover? Leave us a comment below and we’ll respond back ASAP! As always, we appreciate you joining the adventures.

Elevate Your Camp Cooking with a KickAss Travel Oven