Every May, Overland Expo West rolls into Flagstaff, Arizona and turns Fort Tuthill County Park into the biggest gathering of off-road travelers, adventure rigs, and outdoor gear in the country. We're talking over 400 exhibitors, hundreds of hours of classes, and thousands of people whose whole thing is going places nobody else is going — and eating well when they get there.
That last part is where things get interesting for us. Because buried in all the lifted trucks, rooftop tents, and recovery gear is a surprisingly serious camp cooking culture. There were culinary classes running all weekend, live cooking demos, and vendors building gear specifically designed to close the gap between your backyard kitchen and a campsite at 7,000 feet.
Here are the brands and camp cooking gear that stood out at Overland Expo West 2025 — and why backyard cooks should be paying attention to all of it.
The overlanding world figured something out that backyard BBQ culture already knows: the meal is never just the meal. It's the fire, the setup, the people around it. The gear just makes it possible.
🍳 GOSO Cookware — The Everywhere Pan
The Everywhere Pan
GOSO Cookware made their debut at Overland Expo a couple seasons ago and the community latched on fast. Their flagship product — the Everywhere Pan — is a 14-gauge carbon steel frying pan with a completely removable, forged aluminum "BigBite" handle. The concept is beautifully simple: one shared handle, multiple pan sizes, everything nests flat for storage.
The material is what really sets it apart. Carbon steel — no PFAS coatings, no chemical non-stick surface — that seasons naturally over time just like cast iron but comes in significantly lighter. It works on induction, gas, campfire, and open flame without skipping a beat.
The removable handle uses only three moving parts, so there's not much to go wrong. Pull it off when cooking over fire so it doesn't heat up, lock it back in when you need it. GOSO's Kickstarter campaign raised over $120,000 with more than 850 backers before they ever hit retail — which tells you everything about how the outdoor cooking community responded.
🔥 KUDU Open Fire Grill — Portable Braai Culture
The KUDU Open Fire Grill
The KUDU has been a fixture in the overlanding world for years and shows up at Overland Expo every year for a reason — it's genuinely different from every other portable grill on the market. The whole system is rooted in the South African braai tradition: open fire, adjustable height, communal cooking, real flame. It's built for the kind of meal that takes time and gets everyone gathered around.
The core innovation is the adjustable grate system. Both cooking surfaces — a stainless steel grill grate and a cast iron pan — move horizontally and vertically above the flame. That's real heat control over an open fire. High and close for a sear. Raised and off to the side for a slow hold. The flat-bottomed fire pit lets you arrange your coals however you want — one big heat zone or multiple — without being locked into a fixed configuration.
It assembles in minutes without tools, folds down to fit in a rig, and when dinner's done it converts to a vertical fire pit for the rest of the evening. Heavy-gauge steel with an ultra-high-temp ceramic coating means it's built to live outside. KUDU also runs a full accessories ecosystem — rotisserie, smoker lid, pizza stone, fire rings — so it grows with you.
🔧 Goose Gear — The CampKitchen Module
The CampKitchen Module System
Goose Gear plays in a different category than a pan or a portable grill. This is for the person who looked at their truck or SUV and decided it needed a functioning kitchen built into it. Their CampKitchen module is a vehicle-integrated cooking system — a double-slide aluminum setup that houses both a refrigerator and a camp stove in your rig's cargo area, each independently accessible or together.
Everything is designed and manufactured in the USA using 6063 aluminum alloy, and their MaxLite extrusion profile cuts total system weight by over 25% without sacrificing strength. Pull into camp, slide out the kitchen, start cooking. No unpacking, no arranging gear on a tailgate, no fumbling around in the dark. The setup is already there and already organized.
At Overland Expo West 2025, Goose Gear was also showing their UltraLite interior systems — modular truck and SUV bed builds that install without drilling. For a serious overlander building a long-term rig, this kind of infrastructure changes every trip going forward.
🏁 What the Overland World Gets Right About Cooking
Overland Expo isn't just a gear show. Camp cooking classes ran all weekend in the culinary pavilion — real technique, real food, not boil-water-and-add-packet stuff. The cooking culture inside the overlanding world is genuinely serious about the meal, and the gear reflects that. Lightweight without being cheap. Portable without sacrificing capability.
What stands out is that overlanders treat the kitchen as a core part of the rig build, not an afterthought. The same intentionality that goes into suspension, recovery gear, and communications goes into how they're going to cook at camp. That's a mindset worth borrowing whether you're building out a truck or just leveling up the backyard.
🔥 The Crossover Takeaways for Backyard Cooks
- Carbon steel pans are lighter than cast iron, season the same way, and work on any heat source — campfire, gas, or grill grate. Worth adding to your lineup.
- Open-fire cooking with height-adjustable grates (like the KUDU) gives you heat zones that a fixed grill simply cannot replicate. Control the distance, control the cook.
- Organization matters. Whether it's a truck-mounted slide or a well-packed gear bin, a cook who isn't hunting for tools is a cook who's focused on the food.
- The overlanding community builds gear to last and performs under real stress. That standard applies at home too — buy once, buy quality.
- Camp cooking forces intentionality. You can't grab something from the fridge. That constraint makes every meal more deliberate — and usually more memorable.
🏁 The Link Between Overlanding and Backyard BBQ
On the surface these two worlds look different. One is trucks and trails. The other is pellet smokers and backyards. But at the core they're chasing the exact same thing — fire, good food, and people worth cooking for.
The gear coming out of the overlanding space is starting to bridge those two worlds in a real way. Carbon steel pans, open-fire grill systems, modular kitchens — gear that performs at 7,000 feet in the high desert performs just as well at home. And the mindset of taking the cook seriously, wherever you are, is something every backyard pit boss already understands.
If any of these brands caught your eye, they're worth looking up — GOSO Cookware, KUDU Grills, and Goose Gear all have solid communities worth exploring. And if you're already running any of this gear, we want to hear about it. Drop a comment or hit us up on Instagram.
Now get outside and cook something. 🏁🔥
Not sure what to cook this weekend? Let the Recipe Builder help you find your next backyard hit.
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