Motorhome Review – Safari Chef Gas BBQ
| Description of Item | The Safari Chef is a compact gas BBQ. It comes stacked in a bag, with instructions and a cook book, which indicates which of the components you need to prepare each meal. As shown in the photo below, from the top down it has a wok (which doubles as an oven lid), the next two components are actually the same one – a heavy griddle – flat on one side and ridged on the other. You also get a grill grid, which is shown sitting on the fat catcher below, and finally the gas burner with three fold out legs. Our BBQ didn’t come with a gas pipe; we picked up 1.5m of it from a caravan shop, along with an external gas BBQ connector for a few pounds. |
| How We Use It | We use the BBQ with an external gas supply point on our motorhome, which is fed from our LPG tank. We have 1.5m of gas pipe, which is enough to place the BBQ a safe distance from the van, but doesn’t give us too much cable to fold into the bag. In hindsight, I’d have gone for 2m of cable to let me move the BBQ around a bit more.By using the wok in the upturned position show on the diagram, you can get the BBQ to act as an oven. Also, we’ve found we can sit the upper sections of the BBQ on our gas burners in our motorhome, which enables us to have an oven on the van. So far we’ve only cooked up pizza and roasted strawberries; a full on roast chicken is next on the list to try! Note: since we very often free camp or stay on aires, we can’t place anything on the ground outside the van. This does limit the amount of time we can actually have a good old outdoors BBQ to when we’re on a campsite, and the weather is good.
2017 Update: When we sold our motorhome after our trip, the Safari Chef went too. When we were in Norway we wanted a way to cook outside (especially as Jay was catching lots of fish and they stink up the van) so we bought a small camping gas stove. We actually get a lot more use out of this than we ever did the safari chef, and when we were heading over to Morocco, we stocked up on gas cylinders in Spain so we could still cook if we ran out of LPG. |
| What Do We Love? |
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| And What’s Not so Great? |
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| Our Summary | This is a really good bit of kit; we especially love the fact we can use it as an oven. We give it full marks. |
| Where Can I Get It? | We were lucky enough to be given a gas BBQ by my brother and sister in law, but you can get them from Amazon. |
Hi Jason, Julie & Charlie
I’m devouring your information in preparation for our European road trip. Can’t wait to get started. We’ll use as many of your paying links as we can!
A question…. why can’t you place anything on the ground outside the van whilst wild camping?
Hope all is ok with you both
Thanks
Irene
Hi Irene
It’s fab that you’re getting ready for your own adventure – please let us know how it’s going.
On the wild / free camping thing. In some countries and regions of countries it’s illegal to wild / free camp, however it isn’t illegal to park and sleep in your motorhome – the law is very grey on this. So to avoid any problem we tend not to put stuff outside.
That said it depends on where you are and what others are doing around you. It’s not a hard and fast rule, but we find best practice to wait and see what others are doing being we get the camping chairs out!
Cheers
Julie