While electric stoves have become a more popular option for homes in recent years, they remain non-existent in outdoor settings. I mean, how the heck will you cook without a power outlet in sight? The folks behind the Morphcooker, however, believe they can make it a viable option for the outdoors.
No, it doesn’t look like a camping stove. Instead, it’s a combination cookware and stove that lets you cook your meals on the same rig producing the heat. It’s quite the versatile cookware, too, allowing you to use it for a whole load of cooking tasks, whether you’re heating water for coffee in the morning, frying a can of Spam you sliced up for lunch, or making a meat stew for dinner.
The Morphcooker, basically, looks like a shallow frying pan, albeit with height-adjustable sides that let you transform it from a griddle to a pot. The bottom of that pan sits on top of an integrated electric heating element, essentially making it a self-contained cooking setup. Since power outlets aren’t available outdoors, it comes with an external battery that you can hook up to the device when cooking, all while hooking up to a solar panel the rest of the time so it can keep charging. And, yes, you’ll want to keep this charging since, you know, cooking can use up a whole lot of power.
It comes in two sizes: solo and family, with the former having a hot plate measuring 5 x 5 inches and the latter measuring 8 x 8 inches. Both come with sides that can adjust in height from 0.7 to 3.3 inches. Like many, you’re probably skeptical of how much heat a small battery can produce. And, well, it doesn’t look it produces a lot. In fact, the setup needs 12 minutes in order to boil two cups of water, which you can cut down to half by combining a pair of them together (one heats it from the bottom, the other from the top) – a setup they call “Deluxe.”
The Morphcooker is made up of a stainless steel frame that’s covered in food-grade silicone material, allowing it to fold down and collapse when needed, with a detachable aluminum handle that you can magnetically snap on and snap off at will. The silicone material means you can touch the top of the rig without burning your hands, provided you stay away from the exposed steel sections.
The external battery is clad in a bar form factor measuring 5.5 inches long that you hook up to the stove/pot via cable. Built-in controls on the battery allow you to limit how much power flows through, which then controls the heating temperature. It comes with three heat settings (low, medium, and high), with the battery lasting for 104 minutes at the lowest setting and 26 minutes at the highest. Basically, you need food that can be cooked fast without too much heat if you’re going to rely on this for your outdoor sustenance.
A Kickstarter campaign is currently running for the Morphcooker. Pledges to reserve a unit starts at NZD $139.