Early Retirement Extreme Forums

1. Ice Box: how do these work?
2. Moderating Quantity: how much perishable food can I buy before I can't use it all before it spoils?
3. Special Placement: Outside. In a cooler. In winter. Hopefully no one minds...
4. Bretherianism: ?
5. Any other ideas?

What foods are you looking to store?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_pres ... techniques <---- particularly useful if you're going off grid.

vexed87 wrote:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_pres ... techniques <---- particularly useful if you're going off grid.

Wow, many of these methods I've never read of. Jellying, jugging, burial--who would've thought. Neat!

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I'm looking to store vegan groceries in likely two week intervals, so grains, nuts, beans, seeds, fruits, vegetables, oils, spices, condiments, leftovers, etc. Most of these can be stored sans refrigeration for months via metal containers with lids (which would also prevent pest invasion), but the challenge is likely fruits, veggies, condiments, & leftovers.

An ice box is basically a cooler, but built like a fridge with no compressor. You buy blocks of ice to put in it. A big cooler can do the same thing. They make propane operated fridges too.

Outside of raw meat and raw milk, most food preserves quite well outside of a fridge.

Yeti coolers. They are expensive but can stay cold for several days if not a week depending on model.

The simplest solution: Eat them.

I don't mean this in a flippant way but rather to encourage some out of the box thinking. We've been conditioned to buy more food than we can eat now and then put it in a cold box for several days in order to eat it later regardless of whether either is needed. Question the assumptions behind that behavior.

Pickling, fermentation, dehydration, canning

A couple of weeks ago bottled my first beetroot - opened the first bottle yesterday (it popped!) and was very happy with the result. Got 4 bottles for the price of one at the shop and it was fun to do. Bought the beetroot from the store, will now grow some next winter but planning to bottle a few more things now, carrots next - not that I have ever had a pickled carrot before.

I also make a lot of dried fruit leather - these days a sheet a week, sometimes two. I just let them dry in the sun, takes two to three days. Nothing fancy, directly in the sun, under a fly screen - works well. Pears are my favourite, then peaches - but banana is not bad, pineapple is ok - will be trying apple next, not sure why I haven't done so yet. Quince was a disaster, think I need to cook it to death.

I had to give up having a refrigerator. I drive a truck over the road and my company pays me more to live in a "lightweight" tractor. Which has a stripped down interior with no space (my bed is directly behind the driver seat). I found the easiest way to store food without electricity is to modify your diet to only eat foods that store well at room temperature. This means alot of fruit, beans, rice, and root vegetables. Although some foods that are perceived to require refrigeration do fine without. Cheese and smoked sausage come to mind. Doing this also has the benefit of forcing you to cut back on food that is expensive or unhealthy, such as fresh meat, diary, frozen meals, ect. I personally found that my dietary habits improved quite a bit after I gave refrigeration.

You can still get some perishable foods in your diet if you cook meals based on how long the ingredients will last instead of what you're in the mood for. So after grocery shopping, I'll eat food that only keeps for a day or two, then move onto food that keeps for up to a week, then move onto foods that keep long term after exhausting all perishables. So, I'll eat all my bananas, before I eat any pears, before I eat any apples. I'll eat fresh chicken, before I eat any smoked sausage, before I move onto beans for my protein. Doing this, you can still eat a diet with a decent amount of variety without doing any canning or dehydration or anything like that.

The posts above seemed to have covered preservation pretty well. Another option is converting your nonperishable foods (i.e. beans, flour) to perishable foods (sprouting your beans instead of buying sprouts at the store, making tempeh or seitan instead of buying tofu, etc.) This way you can store your raw materials for years, but still have access to those perishable foods without having to run to the grocery store every couple of days. You also have complete control over exactly how much perishable food you have at once instead of trying to use up an entire head of lettuce.

I live in one of those states where it snows 2/3 of the year, so I am personally using the icebox-in-the-garage method.

You can salt meat to prevent bacteria from developing.Also, filling an ice box with ice and then keeping your perishable foods there to prolong their freshness. Fermenting and canning are also popular methods. There's actually plenty of ways to store perishable foods without the use of electricity.

Root cellar. I don't know how these work in warmer parts of the country, but we've always used these to store harvest and perishables. At our cabin, our main root cellar was below the cabin floor, dug straight down probably 10 feet? (I don't know exactly, I remember my parents would climb down into it and their head would be significantly below the floor). It was maybe 3x3 or 4x4, with shelves along the side, and we stored perishables there. We had an additional root cellar outside that was dug into a hillside where we kept root veggies.

My parents currently live in a strawbale, solar powered house. They have freezers but no refrigerator. They use an "icebox" for a fridge, built like an under the counter fridge with lots of insulation, and they change out ice packs from the freezer twice a day. They also have a root cellar under the first floor, where they keep root veggies. The carrots they usually store in sand or dirt. They freeze, pickle or can the more perishable veggies like zucchini, broccoli, brussel sprouts, kale, etc.

This is all in Alaska, though, so I'm not sure what that looks like in warmer climes.

Here's an article about root cellars.

Clay container using evaporation which does the cooling.

For less efficienct DIY solution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmb-kCcDLxQ