Top-Rated Travel Utensils: Best for Work, Camping, and More

One of my favorite parts about camping is the gearing up because you need some specialized equipment like a portable stove, some lightweight cookware, and of course utensils that you can pack on the go, which is what Adam has here today. And this is beyond the basic old spork. You've got full sets here. We have everything. You know, these travel utensils and the sporks are kind of making the transition from being just camping or backpacking equipment into purses and briefcases and carry-on bags. They're a great alternative to those really environmentally unfriendly, disposable, single-use utensils that you get with practically every takeout meal. You can just use these instead. How interesting. Yeah. We have 11 different sets. Some of them, as we said, are three-piece utensil sets. There's a knife, a fork, and a spoon. Generally, these will be held together by some means, a clip or a lanyard, and or they come in their own case to keep them together and organized. And then there's the single-use multi-purpose spork. More fun to say. It is. And it's, you know, it's one instead of three. So it's more efficient. It's more efficient. You can see that there are different materials. These are stainless steel. This pretty orange one is anodized aluminum. Two are in titanium. Wow. This one in the purple case is wood. And then these three at the end are plastic. And the prices range from about $350 up to $33. Okay. So we had testers try a bunch of different foods with various textures and ingredient sizes with all of these. There were salads with chunky ingredients and leafy ingredients, steak, which they tested the serrations with and the tines, chicken soup, brothy chicken soup, and hard frozen ice cream. And they were, of course, testing every function, the fork, the cutting, the spoon. So first, let's go through the forking function. Why don't you try this one here? Okay. All right. Well, I can get one thing on there pretty good. Let's see if I want to go for a real mouthful. Some of our testers actually liken this to shoveling the food. I really wanted to go in there, but even that's not great. Why don't you try this one? These tines are a little bit longer and a little bit sharper. And our testers thought that it was easier to grab multiple pieces of salad there. You can really chow down with this sucker. Not bad. The spoons had everything to do with the capacity and the depth. If they were too small or too shallow, you couldn't get a lot of a saucy thing like stroganoff or much soup. In terms of the handles, like any flatware, testers were happier when the handles had a little bit of width to them and nice rounded edges so that they were comfortable to hold. They didn't dig into the fingers. Since these are meant to be used on the go and packed up, a small, more compact design is helpful as is a lightweight. The three-piece utensil sets usually came with cases that keep them together and neat in transit. Clean. One of the abuse tests was to put all of these into a backpack and drop the backpack. And in that test, some of these cases opened and the utensils escaped. So that wasn't ideal. So there are winners in each of the categories. First, let's go for the single-use utensil, the Spork. The classic Spork. This is the Light My Fire Spork Titanium. It's $24. Spoon on one end, fork on the other, serrations. This was good. Very compact, very lightweight. If you are more into the full utensil set, the three-piece utensils, this is the full Windsor Magware Magnetic Set held together by magnets. Look at that. The case stayed shut in the abuse test. This was a great set. The most expensive one here, a little bit more than $33. Because of that, the testers also named a Best Buy. That is this one here. This is the Yuko Switch Spork Utensil. It's actually not a single utensil. It's two. It's two pieces. So you have a spoon at one end, a knife at the other, a fork at the other end of this. So you can use a knife and fork at once, which is nice. Or you can slide them together like so. And then you have an extra long utensil with a spoon at one end and a fork at the other end. And our testers thought this was great for digging into those backpacking meals that are in really deep pouches. And this guy was $8. That's great. Thank you, Adam. So if you're gearing up for your next hiking trip or just want to save the environment by carrying your own utensils, check out the Light My Fire Spork made of titanium at $24. Or for the full utensil set, try the Full Windsor Magware Magnetic Set at $33. For full episodes of your favorite cooking shows, head over to ATK's Full Episodes channel on YouTube. You can stream complete seasons of America's Test Kitchen, Cook's Country, and more. See you there.