Robin has been hinting that she’d like a full size refrigerator for some time (we’ve been living out of a dorm fridge for 2 years now). At first I tried to convince her of a few alternative solutions, but she finally hit me with one of those I’m-living-in-a-house-with-no-walls-and-no-wiring-lit-by-shop-lights-and-heated-by-a-woodstove-and-now-you-don’t-even-want-me-to-have-a-normal-fridge looks, and I relented. Domestic harmony is worth much more than a new refrigerator, and Robin is always very long suffering of my many projects and our rustic living conditions.

Anyway, as with most purchases, I embarked on a lot of research before selecting what we were going to buy. I’ll admit I’m a little OCD on the pre-purchase research. Perhaps it’s the engineer in me. I generally buy things new and keep them forever, so I want to make sure I’m getting the best product available at a given price. From flashlights to power tools, and from knives to drip irrigation, I read comments on product websites, join forums devoted to enthusiasts, and watch YouTube reviews.

Anyway, I thought I’d share my fridge research results, written from a homesteading standpoint, as it might prove useful to someone else. Refrigeration options are presented from most efficient to least efficient. My definition of “efficiency” will most likely differ from yours. For the sake of this post, efficiency is: “minimizes the cost to purchase, operator, and maintain”.

The Options

• 1st Place: No Refrigerator – This may seem extreme, but hear me out. Humans have somehow survived for 1000’s of years without mechanical refrigeration, and despite all the scary warnings on product labels and food safety bulletins, you can too! The first online anti-refrigeration voice was perhaps GreenPa, so I’ll just post a link to his post: No Refrigeration for 30 Years. Our experience agrees with him. Many people use their fridge as a cupboard for items that don’t need refrigeration, such as condiments and oils. Many vegetables do well without refrigeration (such as onions, potatoes, and tomatoes) and others do fine if you keep them wrapped to retain moisture (brassicas, greens). We haven’t refrigerated butter for the last two years and it’s fine. (We leave a pound out at a time. The rest is in the freezer. It does get a little soft on 95° days, and a little hard when it’s 37° inside.) We also let meat defrost on the counter (no fridge space) and we’ve occasionally used GreenPa’s method of keeping leftovers sterile .. although usually in the winter. Admittedly, we’ve never been truly fridge-less, but I think we could manage. There would be some complaining (sorry Robin), and some wilted celery (and green peppers), but it would be efficient! (It would also be much easier if we kept our chest freezer, which I find to be very useful.)
  • Purchase: free
  • Yearly: free
• 2nd Place: Passive Refrigeration – Most people are familiar with the root cellars of the early American pioneers. These were passively cooled high-humidity food storage structures. We once talked about building a root cellar here (an earth bag dome actually), but the reality is that Oregon’s moderate winter temperatures make it largely unnecessary. Storing food in the outbuilding which will house our well pressure tank should provide a temperature moderated space. For indoor passive cooling, an icebox is your best bet. An icebox might sound hopelessly antiquated, but a modern version could use high R-value foam and gaskets to be extremely well insulated. If you have a chest freezer like us, then frozen one gallon water jugs would provide a convenient source of ice. I like the fact that an ice box can look like a piece of furniture instead of a big metal appliance. Other options for passive cooling include the cold pantry (built over a stream or earth buffered) and the Coolgardie safe (an evaporative cooler). Passive cooling systems generally have no moving parts, can be built from readily available materials, have low operating costs, but require regular interaction to maintain. The icebox would provide the most consistently cool temperatures, but relies on a working freezer (small chest freezers are cheap though).
  • Purchase: free – $500
  • Yearly: free – $30?
• 3rd Place: Converted Freezer – Freezers are cheaper to buy than refrigerators, better insulated, and cool more quickly. The next most efficient method of refrigeration is to buy a freezer and convert it to a refrigerator. For some upright models, this is as simple as flipping a switch. For a much more efficient refrigerator, you can buy a chest freezer and convert it with a simple control circuit. The resulting chest refrigerator is about 10x more efficient than an equivalently sized modern upright fridge. (Less than $5 a year operating costs.) I was a big fan of this option, but Robin held out on the negatives: a chest fridge would take up more floor space and much of the space is hard to access. True. Effective use would require some form of pop-up racks like the fridge in William Lishman’s house.
  • Purchase: $400
  • Yearly: $5
• 4th Place: Used Refrigerator – A good deal on an older model refrigerator seems like the perfect homestead solution, but not so fast! Refrigerators of 30 years ago were built like tanks and many are still running today, but their operating costs can be very high. Even 10 year old refrigerators (the ones that haven’t quite worn out yet) can cost twice as much to operate as a new fridge. Ultimately, a bare-bones new fridge and that cheap used one are likely to cost about the same (when averaged over their lifespan). The other concern with a used fridge is that you may be buying someone else’s lemon, and repairs can be expensive.
  • Purchase: free – $1000
  • Yearly: $80 – $200
• 5th Place: New Refrigerator – It’s certainly the most convenient, but buying a new refrigerator is probably the least efficient option. All the various brands of refrigerators are made by only 3 or 4 companies, and they know that you won’t buy a new one until your last one wears out. As result, most refrigerators built during the last 20 years are pretty much disposable. You can check Consumer Reports and read reviews online .. I did until my eyes watered .. but every brand has it’s share of horror stories, and historical reliability is almost meaningless since companies regularly change suppliers and move their manufacturing sites to save money. My best advice is to pick something by the current reliability leaders (Whirlpool and Samsung at the moment) and hope for the best. Extended warranties won’t help — they expire before the problems usually start.
  
  Once you’ve selected a brand, you now have to sort through a pile of different models with varying features. The cheapest fridge models have a top freezer (starting at $750). This is a classic design and the most reliable, but it hasn’t become any more convenient over the years. Putting the more useful part (the refrigerator) on the top adds about $250. If you can’t choose between or left or right swing and would like double doors on the top add another $400. If you don’t like opening the door for ice and would like a dispense add $500. (Also expect this feature to break first.) If neither white nor black matches your decor, you can have stainless steel for another $200. All prices are based on similarly sized Whirlpool models at a local big-box store. You might think that you can save money by picking a smaller model, but expect the quality to go down considerably. Our review of several brands suggested that the smaller volume, the more fragile the drawers and shelves. There is one exception: counter top depth models give you smaller volume but with nice hardware. For this privilege add $1000.
  • Purchase: $750 – $3000+
  • Yearly: $50 – $90

The Purchase

So, those are the options we considered. We philosophized about refrigerator-free living. We talked about iceboxes. Okay, I talked about iceboxes and Robin raised an eyebrow in a disapproving manner. I enthused about freezer conversion, and the eyebrow become more disapproving. I briefly considered a used model, but lemon risk turned me off. And ultimately, that’s how we ended up with the 5th option — the least efficient.

In fact, it’s worst than that. We didn’t just buy a new one, we bought a huge 25 cu.ft. fridge-on-the-top split door stainless elephant. Why would we do such a thing? Well, it was on sale with a good warranty, few likely-to-break features, much nicer hardware than the human sized model (19 cu.ft.) … but ultimately, when your house doesn’t have a light switch, a refrigerator that doesn’t require stooping is living the high life.

I harvested all my beets today. Well, maybe I should say I did it this evening. Since it was so hot earlier in the day I thought that I would can them when it cooled down. I was feeling so brilliant and smart with myself.

So I scrubbed them up and we started the process of boiling them outside on a big propane burner. We ended up having three large batches to boil separately. Inside, I had my favorite pickled beet wine recipe simmering on the hot plate. Then I peeled each batch of beets, sliced them, filled pint after pint, poured the wine concoction in it, screwed on the lids, and got ready to can them in a water bath.

“Robin, where are your canning utensils,” Lee asked me at 2:00 am in the morning as he was getting the canner ready.

I looked at him blankly and then with dawning horror.

It was most definitely an “oh crap” moment. I did all my canning last year down at my mom’s house and just used her tools. I had never bought a set of my own. So off we zoom to Walmart as it was the only thing open around here that late that would have canning supplies. We got there and then walked around the store for about 20 minutes before we finally found a set. Walmart employees are really, really scarce that early in the morning to bug with innocent questions from bleary eyed canners.

So we get home around 3:00 am and started the canner going, and by 6:00 am the last batch came out. I got 19 pints of the most glorious red beets canned. The 6:00 am time was so not worth it, but oh those beets (when I open one up three weeks from now) will very much be worth it. I didn’t bother to can any plain beets as the wine recipe is so ding dong good. Lee, who hates beets, will eat these because they taste that good.

From our website metrics, we’ve noticed that one of our most popular older posts is about our first attempts at cooking on a woodstove. People arrive at that page seeking cooking tips, but we were just getting started at the time. Now, a year later, we are more qualified to offer some useful advice about this most esoteric of tasks.

The Stove

Our wood stove is shown on the right. It’s a steel stove with a step top. This gives it two natural temperature zones and makes it more flexible than a single surface stove or a cast iron stove with a burner surface. Your other option for indoor wood cooking is a cook stove. The skills required to use an actual cook stove move up the scale from esoteric to arcane, and I recommend you look elsewhere for details.

The Tools

In addition to a wood stove (and wood), there are a few tools that make cooking much easier. These include:

• Flue Thermometer – A useful device (shown on the right) to ensure that high efficiency stoves are running optimally, the chimney thermometer becomes essential to monitor and keep the stove at a constant temperature while cooking.
• Cast Iron Cookware – Most cookware will work, but cast iron or high quality stainless is the best. Light metal cookware is more likely to cause burning, and non-stick is probably an even greater health risk on a cook surface that can exceed 600°F. We like our Lodge Cast Iron a lot. It’s reasonably priced, easy to maintain, and naturally non-stick.

• Cast Iron Trivet – A heavy trivet (shown on the right) isn’t required, but it creates one additional temperature zone. We keep a Lodge trivet sitting on the hotter lower surface at all times. The trivet allows us to heat food more quickly while reducing the risk of burning the bottom surface.
• Gloves – It’s probably obvious, but everything about a woodstove is hot. I burned myself at least a dozen times the first year just feeding wood into the stove. I’m more careful now, but hot pads or gloves are still required to rearrange pots on the cook surface.

Temperature Zones

The various temperature zones for our stove at optimal temperature are shown on the right. Most sources suggest that flue temperature should be at least 250°F for an efficient burn and to prevent creosote deposits. We have a double wall chimney, so when the outside reads slightly above 200°F the inner wall is actually about 350°F. This is our goal temperature. We use fuel additions and air control to keep it constant as much as possible, especially when cooking.

For a given flue temperature, the other surfaces have fixed temperatures. The upper surface of the stove tracks the inner flue temperature at 350°F. The lower surface is a blistering 500°F. Adding a trivet to this surface creates a slightly cooler 400°F area. The trivet gets the most use of any surface. It captures the greater heat output of the lower surface, while having much of the burn-resistance of the upper one. Even if we want to bring something up to temperature quickly, we’ll use the trivet to remove any initial chill. Setting cold pots on hot stoves is bad for both pots and stoves.

Cooking

What follows is a summary of our experience with different types of cooking:

• Boil – “A watched pot never boils.” The first time we tried to boil pasta we probably waited an hour for the water to heat. It turns out that adding a lid solves this problem. (No escaping steam to bleed off the heat.) We quickly boil water for coffee, tea, pasta, etc. in a stainless steel pot with lid directly on the lower surface. Boiling sauces or soups is safer on the trivet.
• Simmer – A slow simmer can be achieved on the upper surface with the lid on, and a fast simmer on the trivet (lower surface) with the lid off. Boiling and simmering are somewhat dependent on the size of the pot and the quantity of liquid.
• Fry – Fresh eggs fried with lard in a cast iron skillet on a wood stove–now there’s a dose of country living nirvana. Cast iron is great for frying as it holds the heat and evens it out. The trivet on the lower surface is just about the perfect temperature for frying. As long as the oil has heated sufficiently, nothing sticks to the cast iron and the cure improves with each use.
• Dutch Oven – Dutch oven cooking is particularly well suited for wood stoves and you can find a lot of nice recipes online. Flat bottom cast iron Dutch ovens are essential, and a bail (wire loop handle) makes them much easier to move. We can slow cook in the Dutch oven on the upper surface, or roast things on the trivet. One of my new favorite dishes includes ham and sweet potatoes cooked in a Dutch oven on the lower trivet for about an hour.
• Bake – Baking on a wood stove has been challenging (translation: charcoal cake). While cast iron shines for other cooking, it suffers from several flaws when used for baking. It heats from the bottom up, so when those biscuits or cookies are done on the top they are charred on the bottom. Also, it retains heat, thus allowing it to thoroughly burn that cake you removed from the heat at the perfect time and then left on the counter to cool. Immediate removal from the cookware is required. We’ve found that thin crust pizzas can be baked just fine on the upper surface in a cast iron frying pan. Cookies can often be baked similarly. We’ve also had limited success with biscuits and cake through a more complicated process. We put them in a light metal pan, suspended (using a spacer of some type) within a preheated Dutch oven, sitting on a trivet on the lower surface. The idea is to provide a hot air environment while buffering the bottom of the cooking container from excesses of heat. For biscuits, we’ve found that periodically removing the lid (while keeping it hot) is required to allow them to dry correctly. I’m under the impression that many of the issues we’ve encountered can be solved by using a stove-top portable oven. To be honest, I’m not sure why we haven’t bought one.
• Popcorn – Popcorn was our first great success on the wood stove! A hand-cranked popper saves your stove from scratches caused by shaking a pot. We set the popper directly on the lower surface and crank away. It’s usually done in 2 minutes or so. Popcorn absolutely won’t pop for us if the flue temp falls below our 200°F minimum.

Have I made you hungry yet? Good! That’s all for now. I have a cast iron pot of Cuban black beans with olive oil simmering on the upper stove surface, and it’s calling my name.

This is the second time we have made lard. The first time was in a lard making group party where no one had done it before. We spent the whole time reading out directions and asking each other if they thought we were doing it right. Thankfully, this time it seemed much easier after doing it once before.

We requested that the fat be saved from the half of pig we bought when it was butchered. Our lard from last year was getting down and we wanted a fresh supply for next year. Some things taste best cooked in lard. The goal in rendering lard is to boil out all the water and strain out all the impurities. You do this by slowly melting the fat, and raising it to a temperature just above the boiling point of water. If you get it too hot, the oil will start to burn and the lard will take on a “piggy” taste. This is not a fast process. I know some people toss it in a large casserole dish in the oven at 250 for 24 hours or so. We processed it in a pot on the stove top for about 7 hours.

The fat will come from the butcher in what looks like ribbons. That surprised me for some reason. I’m not sure why.

I ground it up as it seems to speed up the whole melting/cooking process. I used my grandmother’s old sausage grinder that my mom lent me.

You add a little water to the bottom of the pan. This is to help conduct heat to the pieces of fat which starts the melting process and helps prevent burning. About a half cup of water or so will do it. We started out with just a little of the fat in the pot and then added more as it started to melt.

The fat is mostly melted in this picture. All the remaining granules of meat and fat have sunk to the bottom. (Stir regularly.)

To help speed along the process, we started straining out the bigger bits left in the oil. It was getting very late at this point and most of the fat had melted. When all the water is boiled out of the oil you won’t get bubbles raising through the liquid. You want to make sure that all the water gets boiled out, otherwise you can get botulism in the lard later on.

Here is what the some of that strained material looked like.

We used canning jars for containers. We put the jars into a pan that was on top of some hot pads. The oil is VERY hot so you need to be super careful. Once the water is boiled out of the oil, you place some cheese cloth over top of the jars and ladle oil into them. This will strain out all the fine particulates left in the oil.

The hot liquid oil will be yellow in color. Don’t worry, that’s normal. Wipe off the rims, put the lids on, and then screw the rings on.

You wouldn’t think it, but that yellow stuff you put into the jars turns into a nice cream color once it solidifies. We ended up getting a little over 4 quarts from that half of pig we bought.

Back in September I was feeling glum about my troubles with growing sweet corn, but also feeling hopeful about the popcorn I grew. Well, Lee and I finally popped some of that Strawberry corn and it was AMAZING! I have never eaten popcorn that was so flavorful. It tasted so good that I didn’t even feel the need to put butter on it. Needless to say we are very excited about growing popcorn again next year. Lee says I should ditch the sweet corn and just grow a huge patch of the popcorn.

Saturday afternoon found Lee and I, my mom and dad, and my sister Jessica driving around looking at potential houses for my sister. After we finished that activity, we took a quick swing over to Deterings Orchard to get peaches. The U-pick windfalls were 50 cents a pounds while the pre-picked were a $1.22 a pound. We choose to save a little money and went with the U-pick windfalls and ended up picking 146 pounds of peaches. As these were windfall peaches we had to start canning immediately to prevent farther deterioration. So here are the steps that we took…

We cleaned the jars.

The jar lids were put in a pot, covered with water, brought to a boil, and then turned down to low heat. They sat there until we needed them.

A sugar water mix was made. We heated water until the sugar was dissolved. My mom used a very light sugar mixture: 1 cup of sugar to 1 quart of water. The sugar water solution helps the peaches stay firmer during canning with better flavor and color.

We washed the peaches in cold water.

The peaches that we bought were very easy to peel. You didn’t need to boil them to get their skins off. For most peaches you would need to boil for one minute and then put into cold water. Any bad spots we cut out.

We just halved the peaches. They were placed right side up so we could fit more peaches in. We then filled the jars with the hot sugar water mix.

I ran a bubble spatula along the side of the jars to get out any bubbles. I got an amazing amount out. Then I retopped any of the jars that were low in the the sugar water mixture. The sugar water mixture should come to 1/2 inch from the top. After that we wiped down the rims, put a lid on, and screwed the lid on tight.

The jars were put into my mom’s waterbath canner. She added water as necessary so it covered the jars. With the lid on, we waited until it came to a rolling boil with steam spitting out and set the timer for 30 minutes. Here is a beautiful picture of a cooled down can of cooked peaches. Yummy!

So far we have canned 61 quarts of peaches with around 12-14 more quarts to go. The ones we didn’t can weren’t ripe enough at the time. There is a full box left to do.

I went down to my moms today and we canned up some tomatoes. This is how we went about it.

We cleaned the jars.

The jar lids were put in a pot, covered with water, brought to a boil, and then turned down to low heat. They sat there until we needed them.

The tomatoes were washed. Then we put the tomatoes one layer deep into a colander.

We boiled them for one minute

We then put them into a sink full of cold water. After that we started taking off the tomato skins and removed the stem connection.

Boiling the tomatoes made their skin crack and very easy to slip off.

Once the tomato skins were off we put them into quart jars. We filled them about 3/4ths way full.

Once they were 3/4ths way full we smashed them with our hands so that the tomatoes juices came out. That way you wouldn’t have to use any water. We continued filling the the jar up until it was 1/2 inch from the top. We then used a bubble removing stick to take out all the air bubbles.

We put one teaspoon of salt directly into the top of the jar of tomatoes. Then we wiped down the rims, put the lid on, and screwed the lid on tightly. The newer recommendations for canning tomatoes say to use some lemon juice to help with the acidity levels. We didn’t do that as my mom said that in all her years of canning she has never had a problem with botulism. If I was a person that liked to eat canned tomatoes straight from the can then maybe I would be more concerned with using lemon juice. As it is, Lee and I only use our canned tomatoes for sauces that end up getting simmered for a long time, and that would kill any botulism if there was a bad can. Cooking in a uncovered simmer for 10 minutes will kill botulism and the food will be safe for consumption. Also, suggestions on acid levels seem to be focused on water bath canning, and we pressure canned our tomatoes.

With my new pressure canner it calls for 1 1/2 inch of water in the bottom of the pot. Once we filled it with the specified amount of water we than placed the seven quart jars in it.

My All American Pressure Canner calls for you to wait until the canner starts spitting steam through the steam vent, then time that for seven minutes, put the weight on for 10 pounds, wait until it comes to the correct 10 pounds pressure, and then time the tomatoes for 10 minutes. After the 10 minutes are finished, turn the heat off, let the pressure come to zero, take the weight off, and then wait 2 minutes before undoing the lid.

Tada, here was what one of our finished tomato jars looked like. Nice and pipping hot. I got nine quarts and my mom had eight. For my next batch of canned tomatoes I think that I will add some spices and onion to mix it up a little.

Lee and I are trying to eat beets more since they are nutritionally good for you. I grew a row of the Flat Of Egypt variety this spring. I didn’t think that I would get anything to harvest as this vegetable prefers better soil conditions. Much to my surprise most of them managed to get big enough to eat. So down I went to my mom’s house to can again. She had some jaw dropping enormous Bull’s Blood beets that she gave me. My mom had only grown them for their greens and then they ended up getting away from her. She didn’t want to can them for herself as she had some still left over from last year. (And my dad won’t eat them.)

So I made a beet recipe with red wine from page 108 of the first edition of the book The Joy Of Pickling by Linda Ziedrich. Supposedly even if you don’t like beets you may like this beet recipe. The picture doesn’t do the beets justice as they are the most beautiful burgundy color. Looking back on the recipe I noticed that I accidentally put in 1 cup extra of wine. After consulting my Mom she assured me it would be fine as the wine was an acid and preserving ingredient. So the only after effect would be more of a wine taste. That doesn’t sound so bad to me.  I have to wait three weeks until trying a jar which is hard as I am dying to taste one. One nice thing about Ziedrich’s recipe was that you could water bath can it for 30 minutes. The rest of the beets I had left over were done in a pressure canner and were the classic salt, water, beets recipe.

We are presently overwhelmed with near-bolting lettuce, so I decided to try a blog suggestion to use lettuce for sauerkraut. I don’t know how it will turn out (lettuce lacks the crunch of cabbage), but it was good practice for when (if?) our actual cabbage heads mature. Robin and I plan to turn most of those into cultured sauerkraut. Proper sauerkraut is made by lecto-fermentation, a bacteriological process that converts sugars in the cabbage into lactic acid. This lowers the pH to a level that inhibits spoiling, while increasing the nutrient profile and improving the flavor. After you’ve had fresh raw sauerkraut, that mass produced vinegar stuff at the supermarket just doesn’t compete.

My nephew has been brewing beer for almost a year, and he has progressively raised my interest level in it. (Another factor is Oregon’s large selection of good craft beers.) I finally took the plunge and bought beer making gear and ingredients for a German style wheat beer (hefeweizen) at Valley Vintners & Brewer. I also tracked down a propane burner for heating water (the sort people use to burn down their houses when frying turkeys). The basic beer making process is pretty straightforward: steep grains in hot water, boil malt extract, add hops at certain times, strain into a carboy with cold water, chill to less than 80°, and pitch the yeast. The devil is in the details … and the sanitation.

The picture at the right is my first batch 36 hours into fermentation. The half gallon mason jar is acting as an air lock to deal with all the foam. I’ll rack to a secondary in a week, and then bottle it 1 to 2 weeks after that. Beer brewing is more rewarding than wine making (if you like beer) because the result is ready so quickly. As is my wont, I’m already reading about ways to make the process more complicated and less dependent on purchased ingredients: grain mash brewing, yeast washing, barley malting, hop growing, etc. Now my long term goal is to brew directly from barley and hops grown on site. Don’t tell Robin. I think her long term goal is electric lighting.