permaculture kitchen

Hey all,
Lots of questions to answer, lots of info to convey, lots of photos to upload, so expect a lot over the next few weeks.

Let me start by showing you all the rocket mass smoker. It was the first thing Matt built and did it faster than I could say, that sounds like I good idea. I used it All week; smoked bacon, smoked garam masala pork belly, smoked jerk pork belly, smoked pork Howells, smocked hocks and ears for soup, brined and smoked hams with shatteringly crispy skin served with homemade kraut and pickles was the final supper at wheaton laboratories.

The unit he built had a core in the ground with a barrel and a chimney, smoker on top of the barrel and warmed bench to sit on. See photos.

Matt is beyond awesome and threw this together with one hand, just to share it with all of us. I cooked some of the best meals of my life on it. Praise the lard, praise Matt be.


Seth
Your local larder,
In the permaculture pantry,
Direct from wheaton labs.

Hey Kpermies!

I present for your consideration, Tim Barker's rocket mass stove all in one cooking gizmo. It bakes, it boils, it sears, it simmers, it makes it's own hot water for washing up. All in one nifty compact unit made from 1/2 scrap materials and 1/2 store bought valves and tubes, and it is, as the French say 'formidavel'.

This innovator made the whole thing from leftover barrels and other stuff, welded and assembled it in four days and by the end we were baking brownies in it.

The heat rises from the core and hits a diverted that goes to the hot plate/griddle or the oven, or some combination of both. Thus,heat is regulatable by the size of the fire and the diverter built in.

There is also an ingenious two stage hot water heater built into the base. It is designed akin to a wort chiller at baine Maria concept. I am told a direct rocket mass stove water heater could easily blow up, and one this size could take out the house on the lab, if not a little more. So, yeah, important innovation. I'm also told there is one running, that Tim designed and installed, at PRI. And that it is run by interns without problem, so that says a lot about this design.

I wanna take this same design ideas, and re-imagine it for the skiddabe kitchen, essential meaning larger and fixed into the frame Jessie designed, and is earlier in this thread, I believe. Essentially make it larger and built into a table top with counter space for cooking as well as prep and a grey water sink / chicken food grinder for waiste. I'll get up some sketches and invite anyone else to jump/chime in.

I think you could also have burners that are hotter and colder, as well as adjustable. For pots, pans, woks, brewing, a still for essential oils, a smoker and various other functions.

Additionally for future consideration...
I think it could act as an in the field rocket mass heater. I mean if the skiddable has a decent water mass that gets heated, then tents or an encampment of sorts could be placed around it. And it would stay warm for the night and have warm maybe hot water in the morning. Just a crazy thought.

Did I mention Beka made brownies in it?
Thanks Beka!!

Now that's cooking,
Seth
Your local larder
Reporting back from the innovators workshop, at the lab

Very interesting stoves. which one will I build?... still pondering.
The idea of the heated surface built in to the countertop is a nice idea for me. The counter could be square or circular with the fire in the middle. If the diameter of the cooking surface was a generous 2 pan diameter, 4 people could be cooking at one time. There would also be spacing options for a slow cooker and or warming shelves below the cooking surface given the depth of the countertop.

I feel like the question I ask myself is not which but when I will build each.

When I saw Matt's work, I thought "I can go home and build that" and he's got videos online to help.

When I saw peter's work, "wow that's big, but I could learn to do build."

When I saw Tim's, "ok, I just want to understand that."

That is to say Tim's work was high tech meets mad max boggery. Matt's work was low tech do at home,
Make from half garbage and some bricks and a tube and it works. The most high tech thing Matt did was pour an RMH core. The most low tech thing in Tim's design was probably Matt's core. So, I'm saying I would get my toes wet by jumping into copying Matt's work with his online videos and Erica and Ernie's work, read their book and upcoming book and then move up to peter's work and Tim's creations.

Or not.

You see, I haven't worked with high pressure plumbing, welding nor built a rocket core yet, so... "personal user experience and performance may vary"

Mmmmmmm, pork.

I am so ready to try to copy one of Matt's designs, and he does make it look easy! I just need to find the right spot, since such a thing is not very movable.

Tina Paxton asked about these elements:

Here are the ones I'd particularly like to hear more about:

Brine barrel
Distillery, still, hydrosols
Master health tonic (please explain!!!)
Preservation parties / days and equipment, preservation calendar (preservation calendar? please expound on this!!)
Sauerkraut crocks
Seasonal recipe calendar
Traditional cooking / Weston A. Price (I do some of their stuff but also Paleo AIP....glad to see you interested in the WAPF!)
Value added commissary kitchen for farms to make cabbage into kraut
Mother cultures: kombucha, vinegar, cheese, butter, salami, miso, saki, etc.
Whey jar and raw milk jars
Worm bin
Zones of accumulation
1000 yr soup pot / continues stock pot
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I'm not sure how to do this, Tina asked about these elements from the large elements list. She wanted to talk more, so here are some intro to each if the topics she listed. I invite all comments, everyone has such excellent info to add to this discussion.


Brine barrel - in the olden days they had a saltwater pork brine barrel, among others in the basement. The just get throwing pork pieces in till cured and then roast or smoke them. Eventually they would change the salt brine water (think sea water). in professional kitchens, always have a couple of 5 gallon buckets of brining meets in the walk in fridge. This makes pork last weeks to months, and makes it tastier and healthier (by Weston A. price standards). So, for home this also makes sense, and let's you preserve your meats and have them ready to cook at the same time. And delicious. At Wheaton labs I had two whole pigs on brine and ice in cooler for a good two weeks as I processed it all and cooked some. The first day everyone thought I was crazy. Two weeks later, when we had finally pressed all the pork and frozen the extras, the coolers were cleaned and stored. But it was two weeks of cooler juggling, a root cellar with brine barrels would have been simpler and more effective.

A still can make essential oils and hydrosols, which are essential water vapors, if you will.

Master health tonic - every culture has one, at Wheaton labs someone made one with reduced broth, vinegar, garlic, ginger, etc. Very strong, powerhouse of tonic to ward of sickness etc. Think granny clampet's tonics.

Preservation calendar: this calendar follows the harvest calendar, apples in the fall,peaches in the summer,mushrooms in the rainy season. So, we develop a calendar of what to preserve when and fill it in with family recipes, expanding upon it each year. I have been working on mine for three years and I will post it here as a starting point to develop one for all of us to use. There are like 12 types of preservation to learn, so we will combine those techniques in with the recipes and the calendar.

Sauerkraut crocks go in the root cellar and take 4-6 weeks to make krauts, pickles, fermented veggies. I could see making one every month for a homestead, so twelve crocks total and a years worth of kraut recipes by the season. Mmmm makes my mouth water.

Weston A. price is based on traditional methods of cooking that we have used for eons, it's solid stuff. That should be a whole thread topic.

Value added commissary kitchen - most homesteads and farms should produce a surplus and have access to surpluses to be processed, preserved and sold. A professional kitchen to do so efficiently and legally is a boon to many operations who turn surpluses and scrapes into refined value added products from.

Mother cultures: a permaculture kitchen should have so many live cultures going, in fact fermented food is tastier and healthier, but we lost the traditions. Fermented foods are alive, last longer, sometimes much longer, have nutrition that is more available and taste delicious. Thus they are worth the invested time to recover the skills and practice them. It is only one of the many forms of food preservation, but a huge one, and one that is a tenet of Weston A. price cooking.

Whey is what first showed me the kitchen garden connection as a complete circle and not a one way assembly line. We throw whey on our compost piles to innoculate them. This we return from the kitchen with inputs to our garden, and they run on many of the same principles because they are one, it is only us who have separated the kitchen from the garden in our minds as two distinct systems. Whey showed me the way. And milk jars with raw milk are a must. I have 1/2 gallon of goats milk in my fridge right now from goat share, raw milk is another tenet of Weston A. price. Raw milk never spoils. If you haven't already listen to Paul Wheaton's podcast with Sally Fallon, it's mind blowing.

A worm bin can go inside, under the sink for easy access

Zones of accumulation: like leaves flowing down rivers and scooting up to the river bank, junk accumulates in places. In kitchens it's the table, the back corners of counters, the back of any deep shelf, the sink, the dish drainer, these are places where things accumulate, sometimes junk, so we can design are way to cleaner flow spaces with less objects, as stated earlier in a post. My kitchen elements list is huge, and not meant to be used from A-Z, nor all in the same room or structure. But those elements we do incorporate should be thought out to remain clear and usable.

1000 yr. soup. The idea here is that soup pot by the fire that never got totally emptied and each day a new stew was built from the rest of the old stew, or the continuous crock pot on the stove that gets all the tasty waste, makes broth and then the contents become dog food, but the broth pot goes on, forever.

Those are some of my ideas, thoughts?

Seth Peterson
A permaculture chef among many

Rick Howd wrote:

Ghislaine de Lessines wrote:I think KIM must mean Kitchen Instruction Manual.

Great suggestion, it might even be what he was thinking. I haven't heard the term before, I've been playing with timber/lumber the last 10 years and restaurants were tech savvy if they had a FAX machine and a computer for email.

Let's crowd source a Permaculture kitchen and I'll draw it, What do you want? Describe the equipment and your spacing/arrangement suggestions, I'll only make changes if they violate US or state codes that I'm aware of.

yes KIM Is a kitchen instruction manual: recipes, lists of sources, past menus, best practices, kitchen rules, etc all contained in a manual that grows and refines as people add to it over the years. It gives continuity to the developing kitchen culture and serves to help I doctrine newbies. It should be simple to use yet comprehensive. It should be laid out in parts, so people can access the info appropriate to their level no purpose.

And yes let's crowd source a permaculture kitchen. We discussed this extensively at the rocket mass heater workshop. Jessie drew up a frame for a portable permaculture kitchen and the innovators made some incredible cooking equipment, I don't know how to connect those threads to here, but maybe someone can help me. Or I'll find a way. So the idea is every situation is unique and thus we can't design one pkitchen to fit all. But, the skiddable kitchen is a unique pkitchen we could crowd source design and that would be a great leaping of point for more designs. So, let's design that.

It will contain a Rocket stove cooker along the lines of what Matt and Tim produced at the recent workshops, so check out the rocket mass heater innovators event thread, where I have posted photos and explanations. Very awesome stuff they built.

----
those last two posts should bring me up to date on questions people posed.

So, now, let me share some news. I just got invited to co-teach a PDC course in Haiti. Considering the poor conditions and lack of resources, I think rocket stoves could be a great use of appropriate technologies. I mean how do you make a pkitchen with minimal resources and that uses minimal resources. This next month is going to really stretch the concept of a pkitchen. Wish I could take one of the innovators with me!

I welcome anyone's thoughts and ideas, since I will need all the help I can get.

Seth
A permaculture chef

If I understand correctly; the 1000 year soup is always at a safe temp, 160f + and you refresh the liquid as well as the ingredients as time passes? Maybe 190f so additions don't bring the temp down too far for too long?

I think a local planting/harvest/preservation/recipe/seeding/deadzone calendar could be "programmed" to be adjustable by the differences in local last frost, first frost, high temps, low temps, latitude, elevation, precipitation etc. This could be an amazing programming project for the right person or group. Knowing when a perennial plant should be available for harvest or an annual plant is available based on local conditions and plant date would be killer but it would take a lot of work and a lot of people's data.

Rick Howd wrote:If I understand correctly; the 1000 year soup is always at a safe temp, 160f + and you refresh the liquid as well as the ingredients as time passes? Maybe 190f so additions don't bring the temp down too far for too long?

As a professional chef I really appreciate this question.

The short answer is: in a modern professional kitchen, yes. But, 1000 yrs ago, no.

So in a restaurant kitchen following food safety guidelines a product can be out at room temp for two to four hours, depending on ingredient and county/state codes. Otherwise it has to be hot enough or cold enough to stop pathogens and bacterial growth. That's like less than 41 f or more than 135 F. (Thus 160 is higher than necessary and will dry out ingredients. It is the correct temperature for factory farmed meats and big ag veggies, because they are so dirty, degraded and sorry to use such strong words but, frankly,they are disgusting)

But good quality (not mono-cropped, not CAFO) food will last much longer. In italy, restaurants have meat sitting out for hours, large racks of top cuts, and it is an appropriate sign of freshness and quality. In Austria my host put the leftover roast chicken in the oven and left it in there, off of course, over night to eat the next day. When I tried to put if in the fridge she admonished me for doing so, it would ruin the meat she said. And examples go on.

My Mexican grandmother would leave a cooling pot on the stove all day. If I touched it to take a taste, she would be angry, because I would puncture to top of the stew where it had congealed and made a protective layer against spoilage.

So, no the 1000 yr soup is not kept at 160' it is allowed to cool and ferment and gather flavor and then gets replenished with new ingredients and cooked before it has the chance to spoil. It dances on a line between raw and rotten. Sandor Katz says fermentation is the space between raw and spoiled where flavor and nutrition develop, after reading that the first time, I knew that my life would never be the same.

Sanitary ain't healthy,
In fact the cleanest, healthiest water is that which is full of healthy beneficial organisms,
Seth

If I were you I would try building a Walker stove, doing the cast-in-a-box style as he describes at his website. If you find it quite do-able, then you might want to scheme about bringing some of the secret ingredient fireplace mortar with you when you travel to Haiti.

Off the top of my head, I think you could source the other items locally (clay, wood for the molds, I'm hoping something that acts like the hardibacker board, barrels). Hmmm, now I'm not sure about perlite. Anyway, if you've already built a rocket stove, you'll be able to decide if you're up to building another one (or three) when in Haiti

Fabulous list/description Seth!

Seth Peterson wrote:Brine barrel - in the olden days they had a saltwater pork brine barrel, among others in the basement. The just get throwing pork pieces in till cured and then roast or smoke them. Eventually they would change the salt brine water (think sea water). in professional kitchens, always have a couple of 5 gallon buckets of brining meets in the walk in fridge. This makes pork last weeks to months, and makes it tastier and healthier (by Weston A. price standards)

Apparently I like talking about brining meat
here's a thread
While brining pork and poultry is traditional in the USA, in NZ the main brining candidates are beef, mutton and fish.
So basically...you can brine anything that walks, flies or swims!

I've watched many Permies YouTube videos and though I have visited the forums a little in the past I finally made an account and have been reading 'all the things'. I recently read the post "How to keep food warm at an event" and was going to reply but didn't want to resurrect a year old post and thought I would include something at the end of this post about it.

1) Older homes often had a door from the kitchen to outside with an herb garden right along the house since many herbs do ok with partial sun.

2) I have cooked for larger groups many times in a camp type kitchen, and the kitchen gets extremely hot even with windows open and some fans going. You can put your hand up in the air above the window height and there is always a mass of hot air hanging up there. I've seen in some older homes, early 1900's with what I imagine was their version of air conditioning that was probably phased out as real air conditioners became available, and it seems like it would be a good thing to put in a kitchen again. A window over the door that can vent that hot air mass hanging up at the ceiling out of the home when needed. Like when you have multiple large pots boiling, or a canner or two going.

This shows them on inside doors but I've seen them on the exterior doors. They had a rod that ran down along the door frame and was used to open and close the window.


3) A large island. They provide lots of storage for large pots and other big items. Also, growing up we did a lot of butchering and preserving. A large island in the kitchen would have made a lot of the stuff we did go so much easier than doing it on the counter or the table.

4) Big sinks, and one of those hinged water faucets that goes against the wall but you can pull out and fill large pots with. So when your sinks are full of the stuff you're trying to wash / process you can still fill a large pot.



5) A nice wall mounted knife rack. Magnetic or hooks so you don't have your good sharp butcher knives all in a drawer that ends up with other things in it as well, or in one of those blocks where either the knife is to long and goes through to hit the counter or you're sliding knives up and down looking for the one you want.


Modern kitchens aren't usually designed well for bringing in large quantities of things and processing them for storage, and these are some things that would help in making the process easier.


As for keeping food warm for events.

I would think the steam tables like you see at a buffet restaurant would be the best solution. They are really nothing more than a trough full of hot water and your stainless pans are suspended over the water keeping the food hot. A rocket stove would be the perfect way to heat your water. The plumbing would just have to be an 'open system' in such that it can never build any pressure. The hot water from the heater should rise making the system gravity fed and no pump needed as long as the rocket stove was lower than the steam table. You would have to have a couple wall couplings for your water lines to run outside to the heater. If used in the winter you would have to have a valve outside to drain the system so it didn't freeze and burst a pipe, but if it's only for events it wouldn't be often it needed drained. Here is a 5 minute paint shop drawing. You could make it so the air flow was better than making a 90 degree turn but this shows the idea.

Hi Chris, thanks for taking the time to create an account! I would say, don't worry about resurrecting an old thread, my impression is that we like to do that here, it stirs things up and lets newer readers find out things already discussed. To that end, once you've read a page, check out the "similar threads" at the bottom of the page, and feel free to add to one. This will bring it up to the top of the first page for that topic, and maybe reignite discussion on that thread.

I'm with you on the usefulness of an island in the kitchen. Back in Wisconsin (when we had a much bigger house), the (much bigger) kitchen had an island and we could (and did!) lay out a whole hog or lamb for cutting. Here in Portland, I think our best bet is to keep cultivating our relationship with the Columbia Ecovillage next door and use their commercial quality kitchen for such tasks.

I think those upper windows are called transom windows, and they are really useful in warm weather.

I like the wall mounted knife idea so much I installed a magnetic knife holder in our new tiny kitchen.

Chris Knipstein wrote:5) wall mounted knife rack. Magnetic or hooks so you don't have your good sharp butcher knives all in a drawer that ends up with other things in it as well, or in one of those blocks where either the knife is to long and goes through to hit the counter or you're sliding knives up and down looking for the one you want

I've used magnetic racks for so long I forget people store their knives in other ways!

Another plus is that as the rack's right by the sink, I can transfer knives to it straight from the sink.
If you're me, that means no need for drying either
I stick my peeler and tongs to it as well.
I also hang my steels right beside the rack so the only excuse I have for blunt knives is pure laziness...

Chris, I'm with Julia, great first post!

A brilliant multi-use island I once saw in a home design magazine had a space for a dog bed underneath (within) the kitchen island! Keeps the dogs close, yet out from under foot. Here at base camp, we won't have indoor dogs, but I still thought it worth a mention.

Okay, I've been afraid of magnetic knife holders because a) I've never used one and b) my neighbors who did use one had all kinds of missing enamel chunks out of their stove stop from their knives falling (or being knocked down) off their magnetic knife holder above the back of their stove.

Those of you who love these: do they fall off? Was my neighbors' situation just a case of the poor use in the wrong place or something?

I've had the magnetic knife holder (from IKEA) for a few months now, and not one knife has fallen. Maybe your friends' magnet wasn't strong enough?

I still don't see how - even if a knife fell - how it would damage the finish. I've got the knives with the blades up, handles down. If they fell, the handle would hit the counter, I think.

I've got mine over a counter that is our "food prep" area, with a permanently residing cutting board, and a good light overhead. (OK, that last part is still theoretical. Right now I have a garage task light hanging from the pot rack because the bright LED fixture is still not wired up.)

Jocelyn Campbell wrote: I've been afraid of magnetic knife holders because a) I've never used one and b) my neighbors who did use one had all kinds of missing enamel chunks out of their stove stop from their knives falling (or being knocked down) off their magnetic knife holder above the back of their stove
Those of you who love these: do they fall off? Was my neighbors' situation just a case of the poor use in the wrong place or something?

That sounds like rather poor placement to me-leaning over a hotplate to reach a knife sounds...dangerous...
I think the rack's placement is vital-out of the way, but not hard to reach.
I've never knocked a knife off that I can remember.

Can you remember what way up the knives were stored? To me, it makes a big difference to whether the system works or not.
I have always stored my knives handle end down for a few reasons:
1) it's the natural direction for me to grab a handle from
2) knives are unstable and easy to knock off blade end down
3) if they were blade end down and came off, there's potential for an impaling or worse, a bent/snapped tip
Seriously. Many chefs would prefer an impaling over hurting their knives

I suggest having the longest (or two) racks you can fit so you're not trying to squeeze knives on.
And since you can stick all sorts of handy metal kitchen things to them, they can get kinda cluttered!

Seth Peterson wrote: <snip>
ELEMENTS IN A PERMACULTURE KITCHEN (partial list)

<snip>
Master health tonic
<snip>

Just a few of you asked about this so here it is:
The Master Tonic: Natural Flu Antiviral from the Healthy Home Economist



Folks on Facebook (this post) were calling it fire cider!

Leila Rich wrote:
While brining pork and poultry is traditional in the USA, in NZ the main brining candidates are beef, mutton and fish.
So basically...you can brine anything that walks, flies or swims!

Hmm, Yes, Colonial Goose, Colonial Ham... No geese or pigs involved, but daisy the sheep is missing legs




You NEED NEED NEED a walk in pantry, not just cupboards and shelves around the kitchen but a self contained storage den connected to the kitchen. Room for crocks and barrels and drums and wheels of cheese and bins of vegetables rather than the modern shallow can collection and cereal box storage area,

Hey Guys, it's been a long time in the making, but I finally finished
some of the cooking videos Chef Seth and I made at the RMH
Innovators Event in September.

You can watch the first 5 videos here, with more to come:


https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE873tGsELbu5DRtp7opXYsOJARV9FZ5X

Let us know what kind of food you would like us to cover the most in the comments.

-Raleigh & Seth

APermacultureChef.com/ElementalEcosystems.com



P.S. Seth will be teaching several food workshops at the Eco-Living Summit
this June.