Testing Prototypes at Overland Expo Camping & Firebox Stove Camp Cooking Vintage 4X4 Hot Tent Camper

We made it to the Overland Expo here in Flagstaff, Arizona. This is my lovely wife Jessica. You haven't seen her much in my videos because she's a little camera shy. But she's being brave right now and we're gonna be here for the next three days. Lots of hustling and bustling going on. They're expecting 30,000 people here today. Everybody's getting ready for the big day. Full-on Toyota booth. How cool is that? This is the vehicle I wanted to show you. I've seen this in posts or somewhere else but just so cool. This old Jeep. Just such a cool truck and I can't really get a good shot of it because we've got so many shadows and whatnot but I love the I love the wood bed rack here. Yeah, very unique, fun vehicle. Smokey the Bear is here. Smokey the Bear, my hero, right here. I'll bet you're warm, huh? There you go folks. Smokey the Bear. Cooking with the wood-burning stove, it's a lot more challenging than just turning the gas on. There is some sense of satisfaction to learning how to cook over a fire. But I think the best reason is it's because it's fun. Like if I needed to boil water really fast because there's a pregnant lady that came into camp and she's about to give birth and you need boiled water right now, then you would stack this in here like this with all of these smaller pieces. This will pull the air through and you'll get a lot more oxygen to your fire and you'll get a lot more heat. And this would, like if I had this completely full of these sticks like this, really filled it up and then got this going, I would literally have a fire probably this high. I mean really, because it's such a vast fire and because all of that fuel is contributing to that fire at the same time, but yet it's getting enough air. The happy hour just started so we thought this is a good time to cook dinner. I have the five-way cast iron set here. I've got some pie crust, some roast beef with gravy, and some beef stew. So what we're gonna do is make meat pies with mashed potatoes. Open up the sumo system hard case and get the firebox out. Firebox set up. Get our sumo stand legs. This is the carbon steel griddle. Get our sumo legs attached. Our heat shield can go down below. I'm going to mount a gas burner. I'm going to get the five-way cast iron out. I'm going to use this bottom pan. Take it out of its case. We will put the clip on for the fryer basket. Put the handle on the fryer basket and we will be ready to go. This goes on there just like that, but I'm going to leave it off for now. Oil hot. Meat pies tonight. A little bit of avocado oil. Close that because we do have a little bit of a breeze going. Let's get the nano set up and we'll have a little water boiling station over here. We have actual pie crust this time instead of the puff pastry. And pie crust I found is a little bit more difficult. It doesn't stretch and so you have to be a little more careful not to overload your pie. So let's see how this goes. See if I cut it well enough and plop it in there. This is canned roast beef so let's see how this goes. It looks like our water is boiling. I'm going to turn that down. Okay so I'm going to go in with a little bit of our roast beef and gravy. Squeeze some of that in there. So this is green beans and carrots and potatoes and some chunks of roast beef. But mostly I'm worried about getting some of these veggies in here because I already have the roast beef and gravy going on. Okay I don't want to get it too full or it's going to be hard to get it sealed up. A little touch of water around the edges. That should be enough. Let's see if I can pinch this together. Just like that. Give it a good squeeze. And I think it worked. I think we can go ahead and try this pie. There's one pie. Maybe I should just get both the pies made. I've got my second pie already. Let's go for it. And it didn't split open the other side. So I think we're good but it looks like it's close. If we're careful with it I think we'll be okay. Let's go ahead. Yes. I think it worked out. So we'll just be really gentle with that one. Get some mashed potatoes going. And those are looking pretty good. Get our first pie going here. I'm a little worried that this pie crust wasn't good. It expired a day ago. I just bought it yesterday. Yeah that pie crust is just really soft. I don't think it's going to hold together. You see it's coming apart like crazy. All right well this pie did not work. You can see the crust itself just got really soft and then kind of came apart. So we got some bad pie crust. When I opened it up it did smell a little bit sour and then when I was trying to cook those meat pies that just dissolved and came apart. So and we looked at the expiration date and I bought them yesterday and they expired yesterday. So that was all they had so I bought them. I have an idea of how we can make this soup into more of a stew and then we still have our mashed potatoes so we're gonna make this work. Will you get into the cooler and get me the other package of this? Two of them. So we're gonna warm this up and put it over our mashed potatoes so that we'll have some dinner tonight since the pies were a flop. So we'll just put all that in. Mix this up. Keep this stirred up. This should heat up really fast. It won't be super thick but I think it'll be thick enough we'll be able to pour it over our mashed potatoes and at least we'll get a little bit of a meal for tonight before we go to bed. All right I think that our... oh this is done babe. I'm gonna go ahead and plate this up. It looks pretty good huh? Yeah that's gonna be a good comfort food. Yeah. Yeah our camp neighbor just gave us a whole loaf of sourdough bread. Can you believe that? Saving the day. That canned roast beef isn't half bad. It's really good. I'm surprised. I like instant mashed potatoes. I do too. They're pretty good. There's something about them. For the record this doesn't really work. Like don't do this because this this could fall very easily. It's just balancing. So I'm doing it and I shouldn't because that's coffee on my hand right there. I did get my cup of coffee. I was cooking this bacon for a different breakfast. So I'm just gonna bag it up and set it aside for now. I've got some nice spicy sausage. This is the first time I've tried baking with a gas burner. So let's see how it's working. Oh it looks like it is working. The bottoms are getting a little dark. I think I'm going to turn them over and rotate them. Yeah this gas is just a little hotter than when I use hot coals. So I'll have to turn that gas down just a little bit. We'll let those finish up. I'm just gonna put it in and let it melt before I stir it too much so it doesn't get lumpy. Just let all that get hot. I'm gonna take these biscuits out and put another batch in because I think they're done. Let's take a look at our second batch of biscuits. They are getting pretty brown on the bottom. I think I'm gonna turn them which will speed things up as well. Beautiful. All right let's keep our gravy warm while we wait for those biscuits. A few moments later. Yeah that's crazy. Get my biscuits opened up. Maybe just a little more. There we go. You ready for breakfast yet babe? Here I've got a plate for you right here. Nice flaky biscuits. You want some more gravy? I have lots. Breakfast is served. Well it's about 7 30 in the morning and people are starting to move around a little bit. So that's the goods. I'm excited that these side gas burners seem to be working out really well and the fact that I can bake with gas. That's huge. So I'm excited about that. This is great. I love it. How's it going? So I kind of have the perspective from both sides because I am a brand and I kind of do my own brand deals for myself. But with that perspective I do know how important exposure is for a company. Everything I build I want it to be able to do. There's a few strategies that you can employ to make it easier to cook with a wood burning stove. And it also depends on what you're cooking. Because if you're just boiling water it's a no-brainer. You just build your fire put your pot on top of it and you'll eventually be boiling your water. But if you want to do something like let's say you want to cook a steak and you want it to cook slowly because you don't want it to be raw in the middle and burnt on the outside. Your steak over to the side you have your fire that's coming up here and all those flames are radiating that heat off to the side. But you also have heat radiating out of the bottom parts of the stove. So that's what I mean by the fire cycle. Bacon is a perfect example because you want it hot at first. Then as it burns down to hot coals. Oh I see that. He's pretty cute. Very fat. He's coming up and gathering himself up a salad. He just grabs a few greens takes them back in. These are the pups huh? The boys. Everybody has gone to happy hour so that's a perfect time for me to cook dinner. And I'm going to do a one pot meal. So I've kind of got some ideas of what I want to do. I'm going to start with a layer of this minute rice. I'm just going to dump that in. I'm going to kind of break it up in there. And I don't know if that's going to be enough rice but I don't want to use up too much space on the rice. I'm going to make this fairly hearty because I've got to make this amount of food be enough for both me and Jess. So I'm going to put a little bit cream in with the rice. Salt and pepper. Cream of mushroom soup. Now this is condensed but I'm not going to add any water. I've got chicken thighs. Skinless boneless. And maybe squish these into that soup. Put these thighs in layered in crisscross. That is full. Put the lid on. Got the best creation here. Thank you. And you're making him cook. Good for you. Wait a minute. Oh you're doing a video. Yeah that's okay. No you're not at all. This is the expo. It's part of the deal right? So yeah. So just so they know who I'm talking to. Hello. We had some visitors here. So I've been looking for ways of tempering the heat. I've used the stone. I've used the grill plate. And somebody recommended that I use the actual X case as an like an airbake pan. Which is absolutely genius because that is totally going to insulate the pot from the heat and it's going to work perfect. I wrote down the name of the person who commented that but then I lost track of the note. And so I can't give credit. I love feedback. And it is very helpful. And we'll see how helpful it is I guess with this meal. Because I'm hoping that we won't burn that rice on the bottom. And we'll have a delicious meal at the end of all this. I should have put this on first but I think I can get it on without. See how fast you have to be? And that still even burned my fingers a little bit. So be careful folks. Don't do as I do. Do as I say. And I say don't do that because you'll burn your fingers like I just did. So I'm going to put this on top. I'm going to use my plate to determine how big this windscreen needs to be. I think I can do it with one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight panels. Okay. A little bit of wiggling. A little bit of jiggling. A little bit of twisting. Usually does the trick. And then there that pin is all the way in. Use the table top to push it that last little bit. And then we'll just slide that over. And we'll use the plate on top. Okay it has not been 30 minutes but I'm finding that this is still kind of not touching in some places so it moves really easily. So what I thought I would do to fix that is put a layer of paper towel on top. Then I think that will help the plate kind of engage with the windscreen and help hold it in the position that I leave it in. So I'm just going to put that on top and then I can adjust these and they stay a little better. And the plate is very hot. I think that'll work. A few moments later. It's almost dark. It's been about an hour and a half. I did stop and turn it. I didn't film it because there was some music going in the background and I didn't want to get a copyright strike. I think I had the heat too low and that airbake pan was very effective at buffering the heat I think. So we'll know better. Let's just check that temperature and yes we are definitely above 160. So this is definitely done. I'm going to put the two pieces of chicken on this plate. Some of the rice up here. All right there we have it. You can see that I did have just a little bit of browning on the rice. So it was still a little warm on the very bottom. But maybe that was the edges where it wasn't quite getting protected by the X case. Let's see how it turned out. The chicken is nice and tender and it does have really good flavor. Yeah that's really good. Let's eat. All right it's the end of the night and everybody's starting to have that end of the night party. We're just gonna eat this up and we're gonna head to bed because we're tired and it's getting dark. So we'll check back with you in the morning. Thanks. Good morning. It's about 6 a.m and everybody's still asleep in their vehicles. So I got to be quiet but I am going to try to get some breakfast going. It's a crispy cold out here this morning. What I'm calling this morning's breakfast is a Denny's Grand Slam breakfast bread pudding. So bear with me and I'll take you through it. We have pancake mix. We have cream eggs. These are hash brown patties. We've got butter, bacon, blueberries and maple syrup. So I'm going to start off with putting a couple big chunks of butter in the bottom. Everything is very cold this morning. Get the butter in. Okay so those fit in there just about perfectly. I'm going to cut this one in half just like that. I'm going to start with four eggs. I think that'll probably be enough. Maybe I'll put six eggs. So there's our six eggs. Just dump some of that in there. Heavy cream. Eggs need a little bit of salt. Fairly small pieces. So this is a lot of bacon. And I'll leave a little bit out so I can snack on it. Pour it on in. I'm going to stop there because I don't know how much it's going to rise. Put the lid on and let's get our stove set up. And I'm going to set it up the same way I did last night. I've got the diffuser plate. Put it on now. And I'm not going to quite go as low as I can go because that chicken just took too long to cook. This method of using the X case, it works very well. The only problem with it is it's a little bit narrow so these edges did get a little bit brown. They didn't burn but they did get browned quite a bit. So I think we need to make a product that is an air bake kind of barrier just for doing these one pot meals. Get cooking with gas here. Like I say, I'm going to have it down pretty low but not as low as I can go, you know. Just give it a little juice. I think it helps kind of hold everything in place. Not totally necessary. I've done this without it and it worked fine. But it just kind of keeps the wind screens from kind of moving around. If you can keep your hand on top it's not hot enough. It's starting to get windy. It's going to be a windy day I think. All right, my water's boiling. Oops. This is going to be the messiest coffee time I ever had. But I do have some coffee. Yeah, the backpacker's mug definitely works better. Time to enjoy my coffee. Coffee time. That's good. Let's see if we're getting close to being done. I don't even know if I should call this bread pudding. It's almost more like a cake because I don't think it's going to turn out super creamy. Yeah, see that? I think this might be done. Look at that. Yeah, it's definitely more like a cake. That is not bread pudding. So I guess this truly is breakfast cake since I made it with pancake batter, bacon and eggs and hash browns. This will be very interesting. Feels like it might be sticking a little bit down there. It's still very hot. I hope we can get this to pop out. Let's try it. There we go. Oh, it did get a little bit dark on the bottom. That corner is the darkest so that's good that's breaking off because we just let that go. So I'm just going to cut off some of this darker stuff. Look at that. Wow. Yeah, I think the heat was a little high at first. So I'm going to cut this in half. So I'm going to save half of it for Jess. Well, it's definitely done. And look, those potatoes are still at the bottom. I'm just going to set it up like that. I'm going to save this other half for Jess. I love blueberries with my pancakes. Nice pile of those. Got our maple syrup here. Let's try that. This should be interesting. Wow, that's pretty good. You know, making pancakes just on a pan, griddle or whatever else, sometimes it's kind of hard to do, you know, depending upon your situation. But putting it all in one pot, cooking it up, it worked pretty good. I'm pretty happy with this. Now this truly is breakfast cake. Heck yeah. The texture is really nice. It isn't creamy like a pudding. It's more like a cake. That's good. Well, good way to start a busy day. I'll take you guys up this other direction where I haven't shown you yet. So many cool rigs. Now that's a pretty cool setup. Look at that. That's not a rooftop tent. That whole roof has actually been replaced with that tent top. If you can dream it, it's here. They got a little bit of everything going on. There's the big boy. Look at that. The big dog right there. Lots of these really big rigs. Seems like I'm seeing more and more of those. Yeah, nice setup. I like that one. Now this vehicle is one of the coolest here by far. And this lady here, her and her husband took this little Jeep CJ5 and I'll show you the map where they went. They traveled all the way around the world. You can see the red line. Look at that little guy. It's a beautiful little vehicle. Lots of very, very cool stuff here. Lots of fun to check it all out. When you're doing a Swedish fire torch, you would set it up with kind of a hole in the center and then you would drop your fire starter or you'd get your fire started down in the bottom. And what happens with the Swedish fire torch is as that flame is burning and it's rising, it's because all around this whole area it just becomes all embers and red hot. And so that flame, that air is getting pulled right through the center. That's why they call it a torch because it really builds up a lot of speed right out of that center. And it creates a thermal column. That convection is all in that same small little column. And that thermal column is building speed and building heat as it goes from the bottom up through the middle and then out. A Dutch oven is a perfect example of that conduction type heating. When you have your hot coals on the top of this then that's going to conduct the heat down and that's what's going to brown the tops of your rolls or the tops of your biscuits or whatever it is that you happen to be making. You want to maintain a long-term simmer, feed fuel in from the side. And what happens is because these are at an upwards angle, that flame is going to automatically be drawn to the tips of these of these sticks. And you can feed them in from two sides because if you want a simmering temperature, these hot coals are wonderful. They'll just give you a very nice gentle heat that you can simmer something and cook it to absolute perfection. Cyrus. Cyrus. Elias. Elias. And Finn. Finn. So you can pick up your hot stuff without burning your fingers. Can I try? Yeah, you can try. Did you guys come from Canada? No, we're actually by Lake Mary. Oh really? Yeah, there's a natural forest over there. They kept calling you their uncle. They're like, we gotta go see Uncle Steve. Nice, I love that. Yeah, you guys are awesome. Yeah, I'm a freestyle. Oh nice. I like that because I can do like mini alternables there. This looks like a house. It is like a house. Can you see yourself? I can see myself. You can? Are you cute? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, the expo has closed. Before we hit the freeway, we wanted to see some of the sights here in Flagstaff. So we drove to a little hike. There's supposed to be just a little waterfall. We thought we should check out something from Flagstaff, Arizona. It looks like we go this way. Super pretty. It's amazing that this is right here in the middle of town. If we go up just a little bit further, there's a waterfall. What a lovely spot. You can see those trees that we were looking at earlier. You just got to wonder what the force is, you know, to create such round little cuts in these rocks like that. This one actually has a hole in it. That's pretty cool. We are still in Arizona, about quite a bit further down the road, and we passed this little spot that was just so cool I had to stop and show you. Very cool building, kind of under that rock. Then maybe that rock was kind of balanced like this one. Pretty cool. Then there's some other little structures under some of these other rocks. Anyway, we're gonna get back in the truck and keep on heading down the road. We made it home. I'm back at the warehouse. It was a crazy drive home. It rained. There was a ton of wind and then right as we were coming home it started to snow. So yeah, crazy drive home. Long drive. I'm glad to be home and now we're just gonna take the truck from the warehouse and head on home. So I'm gonna say goodbye. Thank you everyone. Appreciate you watching. Bye-bye.