Cold Soaking Food for SHTF

Cold soaking is used by some brave souls to prepare food on through hikes of the Appalachian Trail.  It reduces pack weight and the hassle of cleaning up.  Cold soaking may be a good method of eating in an SHTF situation, especially if you live in a highly urban area or if you're bugging out.

If you are on the move you can use a plastic peanut butter jar to prep your food by filling it with dehydrated beans and rice, filling with water and letting sit for an hour.  


Dehydrated foods work well for this, things like instant rice, oatmeal, tabouli, ramen, etc.  You could also supplement with protein drinks, instant coffee, and carnation instant breakfast.


When I first thought of this it seemed crazy and unrealistic.  I thought about Army Rangers surviving on bugs in jungle training or people in Venezuela digging through the trash for food.  It doesn't sound so crazy after all.  

This may not be a great way to eat but it's another weapon for your emergency preparedness arsenal.

Can you think of other foods or processes that would work well under situations where you 1. have no power or 2. have the inability to cook

Overnight oats are delicious.  

Trace Oswald wrote:Overnight oats are delicious.  

Happy Freitag, Trace.  What are overnight oats and how do you prepare them?

Can you think of anything else you can soak and eat without cooking?

Scott Foster wrote:It reduces pack weight and the hassle of cleaning up.  Cold soaking may be a good method of eating in an SHTF situation, especially if you live in a highly urban area or if you're bugging out.

Every word true, but in the main I think there may remain some good reasons for cooking with heat.  

A big one, especially in dire situations, is that the water may have pathogens (too many to name) and the food may have various kinds of contaminants (some of them biological, including stuff like tiny snails on produce/greenery that have their own parasites that can colonize human organs) and thus a lot of different hard-to-enumerate risks are ameliorated by heat-treating your meals (cooking them).  

If you know your water is pure and safe, and you know your food is pure and safe, and you know that you aren't making a cold-soaking mistake by leaving the soak too long at the wrong temperature so that bacteria start to grow in it before you eat it, then it may be a good solution.  But in conditions of uncertainty about any of these, the time and trouble of cooking may be worth it.

Dan,

I agree clean water is numero uno on the list.    What if you lived in a highrise apartment and the power was out?  

Scott Foster wrote:

Trace Oswald wrote:Overnight oats are delicious.  

Happy Freitag, Trace.  What are overnight oats and how do you prepare them?

Can you think of anything else you can soak and eat without cooking?

I posted about it here: Overnight Oats on permies

In a survival situation, you can make them just by putting oats in a jar, adding water, and leaving it a few hours.  You could easily add a little honey, some raisins or other dried fruit, seeds or nuts, lots of things like that.

I always dehydrated cooked black beans and some vegetables for our train trips.  I would start some soaking hours before an intended meal though especially if the water was coolish and then still cook them a bit when we got to the hostel.  I'm sure they would have been edible without the final cooking, just not as tasty.

Some things could be slightly prepared and then rehydrated like bulgur, cooked whole wheat berries that are then dehydrated and cracked.  They rehydrate perfectly edible with no cooking and we can make tabbouleh!

Some folks might get ideas from this thread:

https://permies.com/t/204388/Instant-Ramen-upgrade

I'm not familiar with the term "cold soaking" ... I'm guessing it doesn't mean soaking in the bath to force a metabolic state.

Scott Foster wrote:
If you are on the move you can use a plastic peanut butter jar to prep your food by filling it with dehydrated beans and rice, filling with water and letting sit for an hour.  

This quote doesn't make sense to me wouldn't you be able to carry more food for less weight if you filled the container with dehydrated food instead of rehydrated mush? I guess it would save you from carrying a second container for overflow. Is that the point?

Why not just pack a normal can of baked beans?

T Simpson wrote:I'm not familiar with the term "cold soaking" ... I'm guessing it doesn't mean soaking in the bath to force a metabolic state.

Scott Foster wrote:
If you are on the move you can use a plastic peanut butter jar to prep your food by filling it with dehydrated beans and rice, filling with water and letting sit for an hour.  

This quote doesn't make sense to me wouldn't you be able to carry more food for less weight if you filled the container with dehydrated food instead of rehydrated mush? I guess it would save you from carrying a second container for overflow. Is that the point?

Why not just pack a normal can of baked beans?

The point was to rehydrate a meal at a time just as needed preliminary to eating it from a stash of dehydrated foods.
Cold water, not hot, necessitates a different length of time for the soak.
Backpacking was used as an example for carrying a lot of lightweight dehydrated foods.

Since it does take a while to rehydrate, especially with cold water,soaking a few hours ahead of time for the next meal is helpful....and it's not mushy food as this is not instant oatmeal or something...the suggestions have been for real food to dehydrate ahead of time.