Most people will eat cereal, ice cream, and sandwiches in a power outage. It’s smart to use up the milk and finish off other perishable items. But what if you want a real meal… options to bake bread, cook pasta & rice, and pan-sear steaks even when the electricity is out? There are many options for off-grid cooking but the majority are designed to be used outside, for example, solar oven, camping stoves, and gas grills. They need the sun or open ventilation to prevent carbon monoxide poisoning. Many people live in areas where good weather is rare so what options are available to safely cook indoors without electricity? Below is a list of several ideas.
Cook Indoors Without Electricity
Whenever you plan on using an open flame to cook indoors during a power outage, you should always have a carbon monoxide detector and fire extinguisher close by. If you would like to learn more about each method click on the photos below.
1. Tea Lite Oven
2. Chafing Pans & Chafing Gel Fue
3. Crockpot & Solar Panels
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4. Flameless Cooking System
The Barocook Flameless Cooking System is a good item to have in a power outage, on a road trip, or in an emergency kit. Especially if you have a baby because it can warm up water for a bottle anywhere, in any weather condition. I only have one flameless cooking system so I’ll use the chafing pan fuel to cook chili and this to bake cornbread.
5. Fireplace
6. Portable Heaters, Safe or Not Safe? You Decide!
The Mr. Buddy heater is approved for indoor use. However, there are MANY YouTube videos about how Ice Fishman use Mr. Buddy Heaters to cook food. Any changes to a heater or its controls can be dangerous. Any modifications or adding attachments are not recommended by the Mr. Buddy company and voids any warranties. They were not designed, or safety tested, for cooking. There are two methods most commonly used to turn portable heaters into cooking stoves.
The first is to attach a five gallon Paint Roller Wire Grid to the top handle of the heater illustrated in the video below. You should never cook directly on galvanized metal because of potential health risks so the workaround is to place food on tin foil.
This YouTube video was made by Maine Trout Whisperer. Check out some of their other informative videos and don’t forget to subscribe!
The second method is to pop off the front grill, starting with at the top. Once the safety grill is removed, turn it 180 degrees, placing the bottom of the grill in the top holes (see photo below). (via prepperssurvive)
Self-sufficiency and Preparedness solutions recommended for you:
Food for Freedom (If I want my family to survive, I need my own food reserve)
Liberty Generator (How to gain complete energy independence)
Backyard Liberty (Obama’s hidden agenda: more than just your guns…)
Alive After the Fall (Build yourself the only unlimited water source you’ll ever need)
While we were forced to perform this outside, cooking from the mantles of a Coleman lantern with the top removed. It will still work in PINCH. We headed to the woods for a Labor Day outing only to discover that the woods had been closed before we arrived. Not having a Coleman or other gas stove, the only heat generation source still legal under the Fire restrictions was our lantern. It required stacking river run rocks high enough to support our Wok for most meals and a cake cooling rack to support the percolator coffee pot. It was one of the more adventurous camping weekends we have experienced.
The same technique allowed us to heat our housing during the flood we experienced in 1997 as well. On that occasion, we were able to remove all the perishables from our refrigerator & freezer compartment and can our spur of the moment stew with the propane stove. We were isolated without power for a full week and limited our losses to the eggs that had been placed in the incubator about 10 days earlier.