Brunton Profile Duo Stove

I’ve done a bit of cooking on the Brunton Profile Duo Stove and now I’m ready to give it a proper review.

Let’s start at the beginning. The stove comes in a nice box with cool graphics. I own a marketing and design company so I should know. Once it’s out of it’s pretty packaging you realize that, no, they did not ship it to you with a full tank of propane in the box, it really does weigh 10 pounds. It’s also larger than it looks in photos. It’s ten pounds and huge, not something you’re going to take backpacking. If you’re into lightweight check out the Brunton Talon at 3.7oz or the Snow Peak Lite Max at 1.9oz. The Profile is a high quality cooking machine designed to crank out BTUs and support 3 gallons of chili while grilling kabobs at base camp. The steel construction is heavy and it’s built to take some abuse.

Popping the latches on the embossed lid reveals one of Brunton’s famous 12,000 BTU burners and a 10,000 BTU teflon coated grill. The top of the range is a solid piece of stamped steal that can be wiped down and cleaned with a paper towel or two.

I’m sure all of you gear junkies are thinking that BTUs are measured by fuel consumption and not necessarily heat output. Sort of like MPG on a Land Rover, it’s burning gas but you may not be getting very far. Well you’re right.

Let’s talk about British Thermal Units. One BTU is the amount of energy needed to heat one pound of water one degree Fahrenheit. In other words, if you put 16 ounces of water that was 59°F onto the Brunton Profile and cranked it up, it would take one BTU to raise the water temp to 60°F. Good thing we have 12,000 of these per hour. So how hot is that? For comparison a candle puts out about 100-300 BTUs, a backyard barbeque creates 25,000 BTUs. Camping stoves and home ranges are somewhere between 3000 and 10,000 BTUs.

Back to the Brunton and it’s BTU measurements. Their fancy box says 12,000 BTUs so if we assume they arrived at the BTU rating by calculating the fuel consumption of the burners and we know propane has a BTU rating of 15,000 we can guess that it should burn pretty hot for an hour. How hot is the question. It’s ripping through a little under a pound of propane an hour at full tilt and it is ridiculously hot.

The other night we wanted to make some stir fry. I thought we should use the new stove because we have an electric range at our house. I always tell Cate to preheat the pan before sauteing something. So she puts our hand hammered wok on the Brunton cranks the knob to afterburner setting and twists the ignition. She turned around to search for some sesame oil and about 20 seconds later the bottom of the wok was glowing orange and the oil we used to season it was turning to carbon. This puppy is hot. It will literally cut through cheap aluminum cookware and nearly destroyed our good wok.

Now, we’ve established the stove is hot I assume you’re all thinking about the simmer control. It’s good. I don’t imagine anyone will be simmering momma’s special spaghetti sauce while they’re out hunting truffles for 8 hours but it does simmer quite nicely. The wind screens do a good job of protecting the tiny flame as well. A while ago I was pestering a salesperson at the Viking Store. They were illustrating the flame control on one of their $10,000 ranges and put a chocolate chip on a paper plate above the burner. The chip melted the paper plate escaped unharmed. The Brunton lacks that type of control but it’s far superior to most other camp stoves.

You’re probably getting the idea that I like this stove. You are correct. Do I have any complaints? Sure. The propane line into the stove is a little hard to get to. You have to spin it on and most of the knurled brass fitting ends up inside the stove body. If you had cold hands or where fumbling to make coffee in the morning it would be difficult to get it tight. The grill side could be improved by using a more conventional grate. Flipping it over reveals a deflector riveted to the bottom. Since the distance from the burner to the grill surface is so small it had to be designed this way to create even heat. It does heat evenly and it’s only offense to a prime cut of meat would be funny shaped grill marks.

Overall the Brunton Profile Duo is a great stove. It’s solidly built, cranks out heat and it looks cool. If you’re looking for a car or canoe camping stove this is the way to go. The old familiar green camping stove you borrowed from you’re dad is going to collect a lot of dust after you produce you’re first culinary masterpiece with the orange stove.

To see some more photos of the Brunton visit this link. If you want some ideas for camping recipes this is your link.

Tagged as: Stove review