GSI Outdoors Pouch Spoon

An inexpensive, long-handled spoon for scraping the last bit of the goodness out of that deep plastic bag or foil pouch.

I can’t believe I’m reviewing a spoon. After all, it’s just A SPOON! But in the age of the $22 titanium folding spoon, not all spoons are created—or priced—equal. So here goes.

Many of us regular TSers are old enough to remember: when your parents or grandparents took you to the ice cream parlor and you ordered a hot fudge sundae and it was served in a tall kind of goblet with a pile of whipped cream and a maraschino cherry on top and the waitress gave you a special long spoon that you could use to scoop up the cherry first and then at the very end dig that last gobbet of fudge out of the tapered bottom… Yeah.

Well that’s what the GSI Pouch spoon is all about, except substitute hot fudge with the last bit of teriyaki beef or red beans and rice or whatever it is that’s lurking in the bottom of your favorite cook-in-bag meal. It works pretty well for stirring the goulash in that tall cook system pot as well.
Left to right: MSR folding cook spoon (29 g), GSI Pouch Spoon (14 g), REI Delrin spoon (10 g), REI foon (13 g), Light My Fire titanium spork (19 g), LMF plastic spork (9 g); weights to nearest g by kitchen scale.

It’s made of polyoxymethylene, a.k.a. Delrin, one of your tougher and more heat-resistant plastics. I haven’t had this one for long, but I have an older (and shorter) Delrin spoon that just keeps coming back for more. I have tried various other sporks and titanium folding spoons but somehow I just keep coming back to that simple, one-piece, tough, and uncomplicated SPOON.

The Pouch Spoon is an upgrade only in that is longer, a full 9 inches so that I can use it to stir and serve a double dose of mac and cheese for me and my wife in my tall Windburner 1.6L pot without getting my fingers all gooey and yellow.

I’m not much of a pouch chef myself but to give this little baby a thorough test we brought a couple of freeze-dried meals along on our last outing and, by Golly, it worked! Scooped that last bit of stroganoff out of the bottom of the pouch with about an inch to spare.

The downside of the extra length is that it is a little harder to stow. I put utensils and a few other things in our coffee mugs, with one inverted over the other to hold it all together, and this spoon just barely fits, but it can also just go alongside the mugs in the stuff sack.

GSI's website gives the weight at 0.6 oz, but I weighed it in at 14g or about 0.5 oz; the given weight for that titanium folder you wanted for Christmas is 0.56 oz.

Comparable long spoons at REI—take your pick

One thing that doesn’t make it on the spec charts is the volume of the business end. For outdoor eating I want an uncompromising soup spoon, not some little lifted-pinky-finger sippy thing. One reason that older, shorter plastic spoon hung in there so well is its sheer volume compared to the alternatives.

Did I mention price? I picked mine up for $2 at a local outdoor store in Tucson, and for a while there REI had them for $0.95, but for some reason at the moment they’re off the table, so to speak. For the price of that titanium folder you can get a Pouch Spoon and at least a couple freeze-dried meals to try it out on.