Jetboil Flash 1.0L Fast Boil Stove for Camping and Backpacking, Carbon

Why it's worth it

The Jetboil Flash boils a cup of water in about two minutes with a turn-and-click igniter and a FluxRing heat exchanger. It's the fastest, most foolproof option here for freeze-dried meals and morning coffee, and the least useful if you actually cook.

Speed is the entire pitch, and it delivers. The FluxRing — a corrugated ring bonded to the base of the cup — grabs far more heat off the flame than a flat pot bottom, and Jetboil rates 16 ounces of water at two minutes. Owners describe water boiling before they're ready for it. If your dinner routine is boil, pour, wait ten minutes, this shaves real time off every meal.

The ignition is what makes it foolproof. You turn a knob and it clicks into a flame, like a home range, with no separate lighter and no fiddling. Combine that with a three-point locking system between pot and burner and color-coded touch zones that stay cool, and you get a stove you can operate half-asleep with cold hands. That's worth something at 6 a.m.

From our review of 8 ultralight backpacking stoves, by Genevieve Dubois, Home & Living Expert

What we like

• +Speed is the entire pitch, and it delivers
• +The ignition is what makes it foolproof
• +Everything packs into the cup — burner, stabilizer, and a 100-gram canister — so it stores as one tidy cylinder
• +The heat-exchanger design also means less fuel burned per boil, especially in breeze

What to know

• –At roughly 13 ounces for the system, this isn't ultralight by any strict definition — it's more than four times the weight of…
• –The integrated cup is a boiler, not a cooking pot