Kitchen
Your van’s kitchen is an important part of your build: being able to make healthy, tasty homemade meals is good for your body and your wallet. Thankfully, you don’t need to sacrifice much to enjoy great cooking on the road.
The goal of this post is to help you envision what you want your kitchen to look like, how you’ll actually cook in your van, and how you can use a fridge to keep ingredients fresh.
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Table of Contents
This part is all about choosing the right kitchen cabinet and countertop. Build it homemade if you want, but there are some great online options as well!
How you’ll actually cook in your van, including cooking, baking, and using a sink. You can get a pretty minimal set-up or go all-out for lots of tasty meals!
This part shares your options on finding the perfect fridge and appliances for your van. These will all differ person to person, but these should give you an idea for what you’ll choose to take on the road.
Part 1: Choosing Your Kitchen Cabinetry and Counters
Your kitchen counter and cabinetry is essential for cooking and storing your food and appliances on the road. We won’t go too in-depth here since kitchens are relatively self-explanatory, but we’ve included a few things to think about to make sure your kitchen is exactly what you need.
You’ll want a kitchen with enough room to prepare meals, dish them up, and maybe even a sink to wash dishes. Not only do you want something that looks great, but you’ll want it to be practical, too.
As you imagine what your kitchen will look like, we recommend physically taking out all the cookware and appliances you’re planning to bring on the road to help you decide how much room you need.
From there, you can build or buy your way there. If you’re looking to buy a countertop like we did, Target and Wayfair both have some great options. (Oddly, searching for ‘diaper changing stations’ will deliver great options for smaller countertops that aren’t too deep. See for yourself!)
Part 2: Cooking in Your Van
Camp Stove
Getting a classic camp stove (like a Coleman or the nice Everest brand) is a super popular, easy, and economic option to cook on the road. You just need the green propane cylinders for fuel, which are available practically everywhere and relatively cheap (though a bit wasteful).
One great perk of using a camp stove is that it’s portable — you can cook in your van or take it outside when you want. There’s nothing like making bacon and eggs in the crisp morning air and a hot cup of coffee, let me tell ya!
We use a hand-me-down Coleman stove in our van and are happy with it (along with an electric hot plate during sunny weather).
One thing to consider if you get a camp stove is building a custom drawer for it in your kitchen countertop. A lot of great builds have a drawer reserved just for the stove, which is an efficient use of space. We store ours in the overhead compartment at the front of the ProMaster.
One very important bit: if you decide to cook with propane in your van, do install a carbon monoxide detector. That’s not something you want to mess with.
Propane Stove
Similar to the camp stove, some van builds use a large propane tank to fuel a fixed gas stove in their van. (Yeah, yeah — camp stoves are propane stoves. What I’m talking about is a separate propane tank tucked away in storage with a line that runs to a range.)
The benefit here is that your kitchen has a much more professional, functional capability. You don’t have to lug out and set up a camp stove when you want to cook; with a range, you’re ready to go. Plus it’s more economic to fill up reusable propane tanks than buying the small, green canisters over and over. You’ll really be cooking with fire! (Sorry for the puns.)
If you’re really savvy, you can store your propane tank beneath your van and run a line to your stove. Again, be sure to install a carbon monoxide detector in your van (near the floor) if you decide to use propane.
Hot Plate / Induction Burner
If you have the electricity system to power it, a hot plate / induction burner is another great way to cook in your van. Since you’re using electricity, you don’t have to worry about having a supply of propane or the health/fire risks associated with it. Just be sure you have the electricity system to power it!
Another benefit of using a hot plate is that you can store it when you’re not using it, which means you open up the space on your kitchen counter when it’s not in use (something you can’t do with a gas range). Space efficiency is always important in the van!
We use our hot plate a lot in our van to make breakfast and dinner, since our power system can handle it easily when it’s sunny. If it’s been raining for a few days, we’ll pull out the camp stove to cook indoors or use it when we’re boondocking and want to enjoy cooking outside.
If you decide to go this route, do make sure to build up your electrical system to handle it. Make sure you have a big enough battery bank to power it for 10-30 minutes a meal, a way to charge the batteries back up quickly, and an inverter that can handle the draw of the burner.
Oven
Who says you can’t enjoy homemade cookies and pies in your van? Opt for an oven range to cook and bake to your heart’s content, no matter where you are!
You’ll likely have to design and build your own kitchen cabinetry to house the oven (along with the propane system for the stove), but it’s a great investment if you love baking. This is probably the route you’ll want to go if you really love crafting meals and don’t want to be limited on the road.
Part 3: Kitchen Appliances / Tools
No kitchen conversion guide would be complete without all the gadgets and gizmos that make eating and drinking on the road far easier. We’ve covered some popular appliances to fuel your lifestyle below, along with a few of our favorites!
Fridge / Cooler
This is an essential tool to living on the road. Without fresh food, van life won’t feel very sustainable (or fun!).
The most economic option here is to buy a cooler and stock it with ice. This was the original way to do it back in the 60’s & 70’s. Maria’s dad not only did this back then, but recommended we do it as well. You can use the one you have or opt for a nicer cooler like Yeti to keep your food fresh. The bummer here is that you’ll always be hunting for ice and draining it later on – which really affects your self-reliance if you plan on boondocking. Still though, using a cooler is a super low barrier to entry to keeping food last and hitting the road.
You can also use a standard, 120V mini-fridge. They’re available everywhere, come in a variety of shapes and sizes, and are a much better option than a cooler if you don’t like maintaining your ice supply. The only drawback to these is that they’re a power hog: be prepared to have the battery power to supply these!
For our favorite, long-term option, we recommend a Dometic electric cooler. They’re super low draw (I mean *super* low-draw; ours hardly affects our power system), they’re space efficient, and they have a great reputation in the van community. They are more expensive, but in our experience the cost has been far worth it. Plus, they do have sizing options that’ll let you keep frozen food (ahem, ice cream). Woohoo! We went with the Dometic CFW 40W – it was the right size for us, even if it didn’t have a freezer for ice cream. We tend to eat the whole pint in one go, anyways.
Coffee
However you currently make coffee is exactly how you can take it on the road. Coffee drip? Yep. Moka pot? You bet. French press? Absolutely (though they can be annoying to clean out without a full sink).
Our favorite is to use an aeropress. We can make coffee one cup at a time (and it’s delicious coffee, by the way) – which works well since Isak likes caff. and Maria likes decaf. It’s small, and when you’re finished the used grounds pop out perfectly in a tight puck straight to the trash. Highly recommend!
When we don’t use the aeropress, we use a simple cone filter pourover that we place over an insulated carafe. Then we can brew 4-5 cups of coffee at once and keep it hot all day (even though Isak tends to drink his all right away anyways).
We’ve talked about upgrading to a Nespresso someday, but we’re not quite there yet. And don’t forget – you can use a pour-over, chemex, or whatever vessel you prefer to get your coffee fix. Coffee and VanLife go very well together.
Big bonus of being on the road: visiting new coffee shops. Isak loves to buy different beans from local roasters as we travel.
Water Boiler
We consider our water boiler an essential part of our kitchen. It’s amazing in cold weather – but also for tea in the morning, for making coffee in our aeropress, and for making oatmeal for breakfast.
Having boiling water at the flick of a button (provided your power system and inverter can handle it) is a serious luxury on the road – and it can help if you forget to wash the dishes right away, too.
NutriBullet / Vitamix
Yep, a lot of people love using these in the van. Great for smoothies, grinding nuts / spices, or whatever your blending needs, you can definitely bring your blender of choice on the road.
If you do decide to get one, though, do remember to get a big inverter to power it! It’d be a major bummer if you plug it in only for the blender to not turn on because your inverter is too small. Read up on our electrical post to make sure you can bring yours (hint: you’ll probably need at least a 2000W inverter).
Lagun Table Arm
No, it’s not a kitchen appliance per se, but the Lagun Table Arm is a super flexible, functional way to install a non-permanent table in your van. We use ours for our kitchen table and for work, and we don’t know what we’d do without it. We’re considering getting a second so we can put a table between the front swivel seats, too.
Go Vino Shatterproof Wine Glasses
Definitely not an essential in your van. But if you love drinking fermented grape juice, these are great. They’re a thin plastic, so you don’t have to worry about breaking them in your van (which could very easily happen on washboarded roads!). The most important thing for us, though, is the thin lip — it’s our pet peeve when wine glasses have really thick lips on them, and these are great. Call us pretentious, but if you’re going to get a drinking vessel specifically for wine and bring it in your van, make it one you actually like.
Do keep in mind alcohol laws and drink responsibly in your van. Just because you converted your van to be similar to an RV doesn’t mean it’s legally an RV! From what we’ve gathered, if your van is registered with the state as an RV, you may have an open container behind the driving compartment. If it’s registered with the state as a regular ol’ passenger vehicle, your wine is considered an open beverage even if you’re hunkered down for the night in a campground. Do your homework, be responsible, and be safe! We like ours for picnicking on day hikes (yes, we’re #premiumdirtbaggers).
A note about kitchen appliances
Be intentional about what you choose to bring in your van kitchen. We opt for multi-functional kitchen tools when we can (no pineapple corers for us, sadly), but if you use a particular gadget a lot or consider it essential, bring it! No shame about what you choose to bring and not bring on the road, but being intentional about it can help you keep from filling up a drawer with tools you never use.
