The first time Brent Firkser, founder of GOSO Cookware, showed up at a communal potluck, I knew we would be friends for life. He loves to cook; I love to eat. It was a match made in heaven.
On that rainy December night on the West Coast, Brent had biked over in the freezing rain, never one to let a 3-week downpour spoil the fun. On arrival, smiling and shaking off his drenched raingear, he triumphantly presented our group with heftily packaged bacon-wrapped blue cheese-stuffed medjool dates — still warm after the 10-mile ride — as his contribution to our feast.
Here was an intrepid adventurer, a committed friend, and a creative cook. Years later, GOSO Cookware encapsulates these same sentiments of adventure, community, and good food in its new project.
Every backcountry adventurer and attempted chef has at least a few stories of meals gone horribly wrong; attempts to sauté onions over a Jetboil, making pad thai using coffee cups to hold extra ingredients, and bringing welding gloves on a hiking trip to grab hot things right off the coals.
GOSO’s Everywhere Pan aims to become a lynchpin in these cooking situations, turning every backcountry adventurer into a bonafide backcountry chef.
GOSO Cookware
After years of cooking on fires and hiking stoves, Brent was sick of low-quality pans falling apart, scratching, and just generally sucking. Determined to create higher quality adventure cookware, Brent founded GOSO — Get Outside, Stay Outside.
With a focus on durability, performance, and the versatility to cook food at any temperature on any heat source, the Everywhere Pan is GOSO’s first product. The pans are made from carbon steel, which means they are super-strong, will never scratch or deteriorate, and you won’t be eating forever chemicals with every meal.
If you are someone who lives to eat, and prefers to eat those delicious meals in beautiful places, GOSO is for you. It is launching the Everywhere Pan on Kickstarter, along with a very usable removable handle so the pan still packs away in a small footprint.
GOSO Cookware Everywhere Pan Review
Equipped with a prototype GOSO Everywhere Pan, we set off on our fourth major expedition around the globe, the first leg of which requires driving 2,500 miles from the Canadian coastal mountains to the Atlantic ocean. For the first time, we are a family of three, and space is at a higher premium than ever before.
Spending months on the road or in the wild involves a long series of gear selection tradeoffs, usually centered around light weight or long-term durability. When it comes to cooking, the Everywhere pans falls smack in the middle, striking a balance between the two.
On our cross-country mini-adventure, we have cooked almost every meal in the pans, making use of the induction cooktop in our fancy new camper. With no fumes and insanely fast heating times, the cooktop feels like stepping into the future, and the Everywhere pan evened out the heat perfectly.
Because the pans are made from durable carbon steel, they can be used on any heating source you can imagine. From the induction cooktop to an open fire, from a camp stove to an oven, these pans are extremely versatile.
Now You’re Cooking with Fire … and Induction … and Gas …
Virtually all lightweight cooking sets are made of aluminum and often have a variety of delicate nonstick coatings that possibly leech into your food, and definitely scratch off and flake into your food over time. The Everywhere Pan has no such coatings.
After spending close to a decade on the road around multiple continents, I know firsthand that basically nothing designed to be lightweight will survive hundreds of thousands of miles of washboard roads in the most remote regions of the planet.
Plastic handles break, silicone tears, aluminum dents, and anything glass won’t last a month. The Everywhere Pan bucks this trend, and I’ve even joked about parking on top of it to level our Jeep for sleeping.
While the 2024 fire season has prevented us from sparking up a campfire so far, we are happy to see the design of the removable handle keeps your hand up and away from the hot coals and stops the handle from heating up. This feels much better than our previous welding glove solution to cooking on the fire, and we’re looking forward to throwing a few huge steaks onto the fire-heated pan at our first opportunity.
The Heat Hits the Pan
Here are a few of our major learnings over the last few weeks on the road with the GOSO Cookware Everywhere Pan.
Pros
- Smooth operator: The carbon steel evenly distributes the heat, smoothing out the sometimes jarring experience of cooking on induction.
- Handle this: The removable handle is the perfect length to handle the weight, and it feels very solid when attached. It is easy to remove and makes the pan much easier to pack away.
- Tough contender: The Everywhere Pans wash up quickly and develop a deepening patina over time. On the off chance you do accidentally get something to stick, you’re able to go to town scrubbing and scraping with confidence — there is no delicate coating here.
- One is all you need: This thing is nearly indestructible and will last a lifetime. Once the Everywhere Pan is in your kit, it is very likely you’ll never buy another pan for the outdoors ever again.
Cons
- Do you even lift? It’s a bit heavy. I’m a seasoned lifter of babies and weights, and this pan has some heft. It’s absolutely bombproof and will last a lifetime or three, but is not for the faint of wrist.
- Put a lid on it: Currently, there is no lid, which can be a challenge if you’re cooking in a van or small interior space — the splatter is real.
Things to Think About
- The carbon steel learning curve: If you’re not used to cooking with cast iron or carbon steel, there is a learning curve. The more you use it, the more durable the cooking surface will become. In recent years, I’ve become lazy about using nonstick pans, but I’m happy to report it only took a couple of meals to figure out the trick — don’t add anything other than oil before the pan is good and hot.
- For everything there’s a season: You do need to season your pan. This is something that requires a little bit of forethought, but is a tremendously satisfying process, like cleaning and drying your gear after a rainy weekend adventure.
- Size of your dinner party: Currently, the Everywhere pan is available in two sizes: 8 and 10 inches. We find the 10 is great for our needs as we tend to cook large meals, so we can eat leftovers the next day.
- You are what you eat: GOSO checks all the boxes in terms of being naturally nonstick and chemical-free. Since GOSO uses carbon steel (literally the building blocks of life), these pans are as elemental as you can get. Once seasoned, they’re naturally nonstick and can be easily reseasoned on the road. The pans are made in a Wisconsin plant that has been making cookware since 1910, so there are multiple generations of expertise in these pans.
Get Cooking With GOSO
GOSO Cookware just launched the Everywhere Pan on Kickstarter and has plans to expand to pots, lids, and additional storage and cookware.
The Kickstarter runs until August 17, so there’s still time to order a pan set. Early birds get both an 8- and 10-inch pan and one handle for as little as $169, plus shipping. The expected delivery of the first production run is sometime in fall 2024.
