The Cobb Grill is much more than a grill. It’s a grill and an oven, with a sauté pan, chicken rack, flattop plate, and (optional) rotisserie that packs like a stack of Tetris blocks into a package you can easily carry over your shoulder.

Don’t let the grill in the name fool you, the Cobb is a summer cooking extravaganza in a bag and well worth the money if you want to up your camp cooking game.

It’s been six years since I had an oven. Technically, the 1969 RV I call home does have an oven. It just doesn’t work, which makes me effectively ovenless. In the past six years, I’ve compensated by using a waffle iron as an oven and learned to cook with a Dutch oven over coals. The Dutch oven experience has given me a new appreciation for older methods of cooking. That’s partly why I jumped at the opportunity when Cobb Grills reached out about trying its cooker.

While the Cobb is much more than a grill, I understand why the name is necessary in the US, where we never see people cooking over the kinds of small clay grill/ovens the Cobb cooker was inspired by. The Cobb hails from South Africa and was originally made of clay (like most rural stoves around the world) to burn corn cobs (hence the name). That initial design grew into the Eco Cobb, an all-metal stove based on the clay version.

Fast-forward some years, and the Cobb has evolved into a lightweight cooker that packs up ingeniously to give you a portable cooking device that can grill, bake, sauté, smoke, fry, and boil in a package that’s smaller than most portable grills.

There are several models of the Cobb. I tested the Premier Air Kitchen in Box, which costs $330 and includes some extras, like a roast rack, griddle, grill grid, frying pan, wok, and chicken stand. I found the Premier Air to be just big enough to feed my family of five, though things did get crowded at times. Cobb also makes the Supreme ($290), which lacks some of the accessories of the Air but is larger and would be a better pick if you’re looking to cook for more than four on a regular basis.

The design is similar in all the models. There’s an outer wire shell that holds the “moat,” which catches fat drippings or can be filled with liquids (wine for example) to season whatever you’re cooking. I often threw some potatoes in the moat and let them cook in the fat of whatever was grilling above. The results were outstanding. Just inside the moat is a fuel basket that holds your briquettes and directs the heat upward to whichever accessory you're cooking with.

At first glance, I was ready to hate on the Cobb because it arrived with a box of custom charcoal, and there is nothing I dislike in a grill so much as custom charcoal. What a blatant money grab. Fortunately, Cobb’s custom charcoal called Cobblestones—bonus points for that pun—aren’t necessary. After a couple of test cooks with the Cobblestones, I did everything else over briquettes or coals scooped from a fire. It is a little trickier to get the heat precisely the way you want it with coals, but I found briquettes worked fine and were simple to use.

To be honest, I didn't “grill” that much on the Cobb. It works as a grill, but it lacks one component I consider essential: direct flame. A lack of direct flame eliminates flare-ups and smokiness (the Cobb is mostly smoke-free), but you don't get that nice sear and flavor of cooking over flame. To me that's fine. I already have a portable grill I love. What I don't have is an oven, so I did a lot of baking, roasting, and even sautéing on the Cobb. I made lamb and feta flatbread, roasted whole chickens, baked cobblers and crisps with fresh summer fruits, and even tried stir-frying up some yakisoba. All of which is to say, the Cobb makes an excellent outdoor stove and oven that features an OK grill.

Using a Cobblestone, I was regularly able to get two and half hours of 300-plus degrees Fahrenheit (the precise temp of which can be controlled somewhat using the lid vents), more than enough to bake dinner and dessert in most cases. After some experimenting, I found that about 10 to 12 briquettes reliably generated about the same heat for two hours, which is crazy efficient compared to most grills. The hardest part of using briquettes is getting them started. After some experimenting, my best trick was to use a bit of paper grocery bag or paper egg carton below the charcoal basket, though I sometimes had to relight it.

True to its claims, the outside of the Cobb base never got hot, or really even warm, to the touch. The lid sometimes got hot, but never as hot as I would have expected. I'm not sure Cobb would suggest it, and I don't either, but I once moved the Cobb while it was cooking and managed to not even get my fingers warm.

The only thing I found awkward about the Cobb was what to do with the charcoal that was still burning after dinner was done. While the outside doesn’t get hot, the inside obviously does, and if you want to pack things up after you’re done eating, you’ll want to extinquish the Cobb right away, because it takes a while to cool down. It wasn’t any worse than any other grill—except maybe the Nomad, which can almost be transported hot—but it is something to keep in mind if you’re taking the Cobb to the park or the beach for a cookout.

Cleaning the Cobb in the field can also be tricky, especially if you used the moat with some kind of liquid (or cooked something fatty). If you’re near water you can pour some in while it’s still hot and then wipe it out when it cools and that gets it clean enough to pack up. If you aren't going to be near water, bring a bottle to at least clean it up a little before you pack up. The good news is that once you're home, the Cobb is dishwasher safe but also pretty easy to clean up in the sink.

Everything I made on the Cobb came out delicious, but it would not be my top pick of ways to stir-fry. It just doesn’t get quite hot enough, though the included pan is great and works well for things like paella or risotto. Perhaps the most impressive thing about the Cobb, after the versatility, is how evenly it cooks. There were never hot spots or cold spots. Naturally, the center is a bit hotter than the edges, but that's true of everything. I would generally call it near perfect in terms of providing even heat as a grill, stove, and oven, which is no small feat.

Given the size and number of ways you can cook with the Cobb, it's hard to find anything to fault here. I was especially impressed with how well it cleans up at home with a little scrubbing. That alone means it will likely outlast many other grills. My only real gripe besides the grilling is that the carrying bag is awkward, as the long straps mean the Cobb tends to bang against your shins and the grill itself is wide enough that carrying it over your shoulder isn't comfortable for long. It'd be nice to have backpack straps or something similar to tote it around.

If you're looking for a grill and really want that seared, cooked-over-the-coals flavor, the Cobb would not be my top pick. For every other form of outdoor cooking you might want to do, the Cobb is easily my top recommendation. Its versatility is unmatched in anything else I've tested, and if you want to add baking, roasting, and boiling to your list of camp cooking options, the Cobb is the best way to do it.