Should you’re going to select a single element, a single fixture, and the common house that may be the beating coronary heart of the home, what would you say it’s? I might make a case that it’s the fridge.
My reasoning is straightforward sufficient: the kitchen is the nerve middle of the house in additional methods than one, and the fridge is an important equipment within the kitchen.
With out the fridge, a lot of the meals we preserve available would spoil in days if not hours. Meaning the number of meals we’re capable of preserve at house for subsequent cooking will shrink dramatically. Or will it?
The fridge is so ubiquitous it’s tough to think about life with out it.
However life certainly went on for a really very long time earlier than it was invented, and all over the world in lots of locations, life nonetheless goes on simply high quality with out them.
Should you stay on a homestead, by intent or necessity you is perhaps contemplating eliminating your fridge. If that’s the case, you’ve come to the correct place.
I’ll let you know the way to stay with out this seemingly important equipment in the remainder of this text and accomplish that with out residing on rice and beans.
Why Would You Ever Be With no Fridge?
For these of us who stay within the metropolis or within the suburbs, and certainly a few of us who stay on homesteads, going with out a fridge for any cause is simply ever an emergency: Both the equipment has died or the ability is out. We don’t need to go with out a fridge!
However in the event you’re inquisitive about an easier lifestyle, radical self-reliance otherwise you simply don’t need to be a slave to expertise and infrastructure that’s more and more costly and unreliable, you would possibly resolve to voluntarily hand over your fridge.
Or, possibly you simply need to live off-grid without any electricity worries at all- even self-generated electrical energy from photo voltaic panels or one thing else!
Fridges are infamous energy hogs, so it stands to cause they is perhaps reduce from the price range even in the event you preserve different electrical units and fixtures.
Regardless of the case, and no matter your private reasoning, I would like you to know proper now it’s 100% solely attainable to stay an excellent life, with a number of good meals, with out a fridge in any respect.
Ditch the Fridge by Altering How You Purchase Meals
The very first thing that can make it easier to unchain your self from complete dependence on a fridge is a elementary way of life alteration. Mainly, you want to change the best way you purchase and put together your meals. Or, for many of us, the best way you produce it.
Mainly, fridges make a life-style of conspicuous consumption not solely straightforward however essentially attainable: It’s the meals, meals, snacks, desserts, and extra which are designed and marketed to go straight into the fridge from the shop.
Something within the freezer part of your grocery retailer and much from the chilly circumstances, will now not have a spot in your house in the event you ditch the fridge.
What you’ll need to do as a substitute is purchase shelf-stable preserved or recent meals as a substitute, and purchase them solely. Past that, you’ll need to plan to make actual meals from that meals and accomplish that in a well timed sufficient method to forestall spoilage, after which purchase extra meals accordingly.
It sounds easy, and it’s. However for most people I do know, not far more than this should be accomplished with a purpose to loosen the demise grip that the fridge has on their kitchen workflow.
Cease Making Too A lot Meals
For me, the toughest half about eliminating the fridge was my love of leftovers. I like the comfort of getting further meals able to pop into the microwave or into the range for simple reheating. Who doesn’t!?
The issue is that solely the fridge, or I ought to say refrigeration, can allow this kind of no-prep comfort: Cooked meals, any variety, spoils rapidly when left at room temperature.
It’s considerably ironic contemplating that it’s cooking that makes it suitable for eating within the first place regarding so many meals. With out refrigeration, these leftovers will turn out to be questionable, then dodgy, after which straight-up harmful in pretty quick order.
There’s no straightforward reply to this. You simply need to cease making a lot meals that you’ve leftovers.
Paying a lot nearer consideration to portion sizes and the way a lot you and your loved ones eat will forestall this kind of waste. Except, after all, you need to throw any scraps and leftovers to your animals that may eat them.
Many Meals Can Be Preserved with out Refrigeration
Now, time to get all the way down to brass tacks. Though the fridge guidelines the roost relating to the comfort and preservation of many meals, the actual fact of the matter is that we, that means humanity, have loved for ages many various methods to protect our meals for the lengthy haul.
Just about all of those strategies are at this time accessible to the person on the family degree with the correct abilities and a modest funding in tools.
Any meals that you simply buy or produce your self, and a shocking variety of ready meals, may be saved at room temperature for a really very long time with no fridge wanted.
Canning
You already know it, you find it irresistible. And in the event you don’t find it irresistible then you definitely ought to! With a pressure canner or water tub canner, just a little little bit of elbow grease, and loads of know-how, you possibly can protect scrumptious recent or ready meals for a lot of months, doubtlessly even years, on finish.
You are able to do this with little or no danger of spoilage, and they are going to be able to eat proper out of the can similar to something you purchase on the grocery retailer.
Canning is plenty of work, and also you’ve obtained to have a thoughts for each logistics and course of if you wish to make it a dependable a part of your pantry life.
That being mentioned, it’s a extremely rewarding one. However canning is simply as a lot artwork as science for my part, and it positively pays to study from a seasoned grasp.
Should you don’t have anybody in your loved ones who’s a prolific at-home canner, contemplate asking round with neighbors or search for courses placed on by faculties and different establishments in your space.
This is without doubt one of the most rewarding methods to protect meals that can make it easier to ditch the fridge virtually instantly.
Drying
Individuals have been drying meals to protect it for millennia, on the very least.
By vastly lowering the moisture content material of fruits, greens, meat, and extra, you primarily eradicate the probabilities that micro organism might flourish in it and start the method of decomposition and spoilage.
On the identical time, the meals remains to be normally suitable for eating as is regardless of a big change in texture and generally style.
Dried foods are usually regarded as rations for lengthy journeys or survival, and so they positively excel in that regard, however they may also be rehydrated and utilized in recipes usually, typically with a minimal lack of high quality.
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Probably the greatest issues about drying is that it’s so adaptable. You need to use historic methods that depend on nothing however the solar and favorably dry climate, or put money into an affordable and extremely environment friendly food dehydrator for the aim.
Sure, that’s one other electrical equipment however I promise you one which makes use of dramatically much less electrical energy than a fridge. And except for prepping the meals to enter the dehydrator, it wants little or no precise work: simply time.
Freeze-drying
You would possibly consider freeze drying as a subset of dehydration, and it’s in a approach, however it’s a supremely high-tech variation and one with even higher effectiveness.
Freeze-dried meals are first frozen after which positioned right into a vacuum to permit the frozen moisture to show straight from a strong right into a gasoline when it leaves the meals. The result’s meals that’s completely dry and has a tremendously lengthy shelf life even at room temperature.
These meals might or might not be nominally edible on this state, however as soon as once more, they are often rehydrated and utilized in recipes or eaten usually with little or no loss in total high quality.
The main benefit of freeze-dried meals is that when it’s correctly ready, packaged, and shielded from moisture the shelf life is nearly indefinite.
The downsides are that, one, that is one other electrical equipment that you simply’ll need to put money into and energy and, two, in addition they occur to be very costly in comparison with frequent dehydrators.
Nonetheless, for folk who need most shelf life for room temperature storage circumstances freeze drying can’t be beat.
Loads of Meals Don’t Want Preserving!
I need to take a second to remind you that a number of meals don’t actually need preserving. Or at the least they don’t want it within the timetable that you simply’re prone to eat them in. And sure, that features all types of meals that we stereotypically affiliate with refrigerated storage.
My favourite examples are fruit and veggies. Most don’t want refrigerated storage, and infrequently refrigeration is definitely dangerous for them.
Your leafy salad veggies and mainly each type of fruit will do exactly high quality at room temperature or in a cool spot of your own home. Hold them away from warmth sources and out of direct daylight, and preserve them dry to forestall mould.
Eggs are one other good instance, together with all kinds of condiments and sauces. Laborious cheeses are additionally high quality in merely cool temperatures so long as they’re saved dry.
Once more, consult with my recommendation above about solely shopping for or stocking what you’ll eat in an affordable time period. Assuming, after all, it isn’t being saved preserved for long-term storage.
And since you’re on a homestead, assuming you’ve gotten poultry or dairy animals recent eggs or recent milk may be had mainly on demand, so that you don’t want to fret about spoilage whether it is “on the hoof!”
Nonetheless Want Chilled Storage?
Now, let’s get actual. Refrigeration, or at the least cool storage, is a serious asset. There’s a cause the fridge is so revolutionary. However you need to know that cool storage was achievable once more for millennia previous to its invention!
That’s proper; there are refrigeration options to the fridge! Should you nonetheless don’t need to hand over solely on the understanding inconvenience of cool storage, you’re in luck, as a result of there are many methods to realize it.
Retailer Perishables Outdoors in Colder Climes and Seasons
The primary and in some ways, finest method to cool and even frozen storage is solely to maintain the stuff outdoors in the event you stay in a suitably chilly area or have adequately chilly fall or winter climate.
Sounds loopy, nevertheless it works simply high quality and is once more one thing that your great-great-grandparents in all probability did themselves together with with issues which are extra susceptible to spoilage like dairy and meat.
You may preserve the meals outdoors in protected bins or different enclosures, or depend on a handy possibility within the type of a window ice field, simply reachable from inside your own home simply by opening a window.
Defending the storage location from daylight and utilizing an excellent thermometer to make sure enough temperatures inside is all it takes for security and certainty…
Attempt an Ice Chest or Cooler
Nicely earlier than the fridge grew to become a fixture in each house, the ice chest and its much less efficient, moveable cousin, the cooler, had been the staples for conserving chilly items chilly. Seems an insulated field would preserve ice frozen for an excellent bit, lengthy sufficient to reliably chill meals good and chilly.
They positively work, however there is only one downside: they require ice!
Once more, in the event you stay in a very frigid local weather you possibly can “mine” and even make your own ice in varied methods, in any other case you’ll want to select up a provide of ice as soon as or as a lot as 3 times every week relying on the effectivity of your ice chest.
In case you have a gasoline station, nation retailer or grocery store close by that is nonetheless a completely viable possibility, particularly in the event you simply have a couple of stuff you prefer to preserve in chilly storage.
Zeer Pots are Historical Fridges
I wasn’t kidding after I mentioned that historic peoples obtained to take pleasure in refrigerated storage of a kind properly previous to the arrival of electrical energy…
These ingenious units had been known as zeer pots, mainly, a sort of evaporative cooler comprised of two nesting clay jars with a layer of moist sand packed in between them.
The physics behind its perform is actually fairly ingenious, with the interplay of the moist sand and the pots serving each as extremely efficient insulators and likewise chilling mechanisms.
Dependable, very inexpensive, and simple to make, they work particularly properly in dry areas of your own home or dry climates.
They’re nonetheless completely viable at this time, particularly for produce, cheeses and eggs. Should you assume a couple of drops in temperature is sufficient to protect your meals rapidly and cheaply, they may work.
Root Cellars are Nonetheless Tops for Off-Grid Meals Storage
After all, what sort of homesteading article would this be if I didn’t point out root cellars? Root cellars have lengthy been a fixture for folks all over the world all through historical past and that’s for an excellent cause: they work!
If you begin to go underground, the temperature tends to get cooler and likewise stabilize. A well-built and ventilated root cellar will keep very cool (a lot cooler than that inside a zeer pot) and fairly dry, making it preferrred for storing greens and other goods.
It’d seem to be an enormous endeavor to put in a root cellar, however when you’ve got a basement, there’s an excellent likelihood that it’d be capable to work simply high quality with just a little little bit of modification.
If not, there are numerous designs from the straightforward and cheap to the extremely intricate that you may DIY and dig your self.
Spring Homes Can Hold Meals Cool
A kind of cousin to the basis cellar is the spring home. A spring home is a extremely restricted however undeniably efficient meals storage answer. It’s restricted solely by the truth that you want a spring or different supply of cool, flowing water in your property to implement correctly.
The spring home is constructed partially or solely over the water, and the cool water transferring beneath it dramatically chills the air inside.
Humidity may be a problem, however with correct air flow, what you mainly get is a walk-in fridge, though one that isn’t almost chilly sufficient for correctly freezing meals.
The excellent news is they’ll present greater than sufficient storage and even a big household. In case your property will help one, and also you don’t thoughts strolling all the way down to it to get what you want, it’s laborious to beat a spring home for cool storage!
