Category: Food Storage & Cooking

Good afternoon, Hugh, Recently SurvivalBlog has presented several articles on food preservation, including extremely informative ones from your wife, Sarah. I’ve become curious about a few things: Is there a minimum vacuum level necessary for food preservation? (This assumes other factors, such as the lack of heat-based canning procedures are not necessary for preservation.) Are there advantages to purging air from a food container with nitrogen? If so, is there a recommended procedure for that? Does vacuum sealing after nitrogen purging offer additional advantages? You have tested and reported on a commercially available home freeze dryer; how much preservation time …

Those who have been following my writings probably have figured out by now that I have a great deal of respect for efficiency and resourcefulness. It is my nature to pursue these. With the garden growing and an abundant surplus of fruits and vegetables just around the corner, the preservation of these is on my mind, as it has been annually this time of year since I first began gardening long ago. The process needs to have high quality results but be done efficiently and use as little precious storage space as possible, too. In the past, we’ve tried every …

Dear Mr. Rawles and Mr. Latimer, I read with interest your recent article on rocket stoves and slow cooking. I would like to note that while rocket stoves do use less fuel, a person can also burn less fuel and save time with a pressure cooker. Many people are totally unaware that there are very small 1.5 liter pressure cookers for sale that use very little fuel to cook a delicious and healthy meal. If you are going to go to the trouble of using an efficient stove, it pays to use efficient cooking vessels. I recently made two YouTube …

Mr. Rawles, SurvivalBlog is one of our daily Internet staples. My family has gleaned far too much from the site to ignore. Today’s article on rocket stoves and a reader’s submission touting the benefits of a slow cooker were meant to go together, maybe even Heaven sent. We have a slow cooker, and we also have a rocket stove. However, in a hunker down crisis the slow cooker becomes almost useless without using an alternate AC source. But the rocket stove, grid down, becomes a wonderful item to have in your quiver of preps. It excels in heating items quickly …