Middle Class Off-Grid Kitchen

I've lived without access to a proper kitchen for upwards of fourteen years and I've learned a few tricks. I think you can establish a middle class off-grid kitchen without just installing crazy amounts of expensive electrical supply.

A minimum viable kitchen has adequate water, some food storage and at least one source of heat to cook with. For a middle class kitchen, you probably want a little more generous water supply for cooking and washing dishes afterwards than you would be shooting for if the goal is a minimum viable kitchen.

You also want more cooking options, like a two or three burner stove plus oven. Here's instructions for making an earthen oven, no electricity required.

For storage, you don't necessarily need a refrigerator but you may be able to arrange some cool storage, like a cellar or unheated garage in winter or outside shed in winter. I will talk later about cooking without a refrigerator.

I was a homemaker for two decades and my mother and sister considered me to be not a serious cook. Meanwhile, workers at the grocery store saw me so much they joked they wanted me to talk to their "microwave queen" wife who never cooked.

I don't really like cooking. But I like eating well and I did a lot of cooking for a lot of years as a full-time wife and mom with special dietary needs in the family.

And I usually used two to three burners on your stereotypical four burner American range. Most years, I used four burners twice a year to make traditional Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner and when I turned on that fourth burner for Thanksgiving dinner, it would smoke because of built-up grease even though I cleaned regularly and kept it covered with a decorative burner cover to make it a useful flat surface in my kitchen.

So if you are off grid or wanting to go off grid, ask yourself if you expect to be cooking meals regularly similar to traditional American Thanksgiving dinner. If you have three or more children in a nuclear family with five or more people total, you may need four burners plus an oven to adequately feed people.

Most American households today have one to three people. Mine has three people, putting it at the top end for "average" American households today, and I would be fine living with two burners and an oven.

I have, in fact, lived with one or two oven pans, one frying pan and one cook pot and a few cooking utensils for months (or years) at a time while we cooked for three people daily. Modern cookbooks tend to assume you have a special type of oven pan for every imaginable use. Old cookbooks typically gave alternate instructions for what kind of pan you would be cooking it in because most households had very little in the way of options.

So I was cooking with very few pots, pans and utensils before I went without a proper kitchen for fourteen years or more. And we cooked from scratch daily and had serious medical and financial problems impacting our food options.

Utensils 

I had no mixer. I had a whisk for stirring eggs, though that was a luxury. You can also use a fork.

I had a bamboo spoon for stirring stuff in the mixing bowl or pot. Bamboo is harder than most wooden kitchen spoons and more resistant to growing mold.

You must clean and dry a wooden or bamboo spoon promptly. You can't let it soak or stay wet for long periods. It molds and then you have to throw it out.

I had one good paring knife and a spatula, plus eating utensils (forks, spoons, butter knives).

I had one mixing bowl.

Meal Ideas

Food culture in much of the world implicitly assumes you have a large family and "mom" cooks big meals from scratch daily. That's no longer true for most of the US. 

I started a site called Nutrient Dense to talk about that. Here is a quick overview of how some of those recipes developed while we had a full service kitchen but minimal cookware.

We routinely made flat bread in the pan on the stovetop and turned it into individual pizzas in the oven.

For a time, we only had a large, deep frying pan and no pot. My son cooked steaks and left the last two or three in the pan, added water, salt and veggies and made me stew. 

My sons would eat something like potato chips or bread of some kind with their steaks. My son was just learning to cook and they were happy with that.

I wasn't. I need more veggies than they do. So we figured out how to add vegetables to my diet while still producing a meal using just one pot within his skill set.

We later acquired a deep pot and then we would make steak and mashed potatoes. The linked mashed potato recipe is my creation and uses no milk. It can be made with shelf stable fats like clarified butter and/or coconut oil. You could add powdered milk if you really want milk in your mashed potatoes. (Please note, I sometimes topped my mashed potatoes with corn and black bean salsa to add veggies to the meat and potatoes meal my son prepared.)

Life without a Refrigerator 

The three main food staples for most of the world are rice, noodles and potatoes. None of them requires refrigeration, though potatoes should be stored in a cool, dark place (because they turn green and become poisonous when exposed to sunlight).

As noted above, you can have butter in an off-grid kitchen without a refrigerator. You just need to clarify it or purchase ghee and then you have shelf stable butter that keeps for something like two months (estimates in reading materials vary and I've seen suggestions it may be good for up to four months).

You can keep powdered milk on hand for cooking or even drinking instant milk. I used to travel with powdered milk plus Carnation Instant Breakfast. If you can add it to cold water, it's not too bad and I have read anecdotally that kids that grow up with powdered milk think regular milk is weird. So you can tweak it a bit and see what works for you and you may also just get used to it.

You can dry fruits and vegetables or purchase dried fruits and vegetables. Dried fruits and vegetables are shelf stable. You will need to learn to cook a bit differently and adapt recipes to the fact that you are cooking with dried fruits and vegetables.

You can potentially do cold prep ramen with dried vegetables and the only adjustment is you probably need to let it set a while to rehydrate the vegetables. 

I spent roughly six years in poverty housing. I floated around three different tiny apartments in two different buildings that were a hundred years old. Sometimes I had a fridge and George Foreman Grill or just a fridge or just a George Foreman Grill. Or a dying fridge that didn't adequately keep perishables cold but kept drinks cool plus a George Foreman Grill.

I shopped daily and I typically bought meat and cooked it as soon as I got home. You might also be able to do something like buy frozen meats and keep a few days supply in a cooler.

When I had my full service kitchen with limited cookware, I sometimes had a freezer full of meat bought on sale (up to half off). I got a butcher to cut it into small breakfast steaks and then froze it in individual portions of one to a few steaks per ziploc bag.

You may be able to do something like buy frozen vegetables and individually frozen bags of chicken parts (typically breasts or legs), fill a small cooler full on Friday night and plan to use it all up over the weekend, then eat stuff like pasta cooked with hard cheeses and dried veggies or other shelf stable foods Monday through Thursday.

Keeping the cooler someplace cool may help make this work. Microclimates make a much bigger impact than many modern people appreciate.

The key to keeping coconut oil liquid at room temperature is setting it in a warm spot in the kitchen, like next to the refrigerator or between the refrigerator and stove. The key to keeping things cold is keeping them out of sunlight and away from heat sources like the stove. A few degrees difference can be the difference between this working surprisingly well and it flopping.

Think about anytime it has ever snowed. Snow in the shadow of buildings may linger for days while snow in a sunny spot may be gone first.

You may be able to arrange a cold shelf that helps keep things cool and extends the shelf life of foods like fresh produce, hard cheeses and cured meats. Lots of sliced or diced pepperoni is shelf stable until opened and says "Refrigerate after opening." It would almost certainly be fine for a few days at least on a cold shelf (or in a cooler with some cold items) after opening.

If you have no fridge, you may not be able to do pizza sauce. Not a big deal, really. I used to buy some upscale frozen pizza from some famous chef which had a few tomato slices in place of pizza sauce.

(If it's good enough for snooty famous chefs, it's good enough for dirt poor, off-grid Americans. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.)

You can get dried tomatoes and soak them in water for a few minutes before baking or look for dried tomato slices packed in oil as your pizza sauce alternative. 

Most likely, salsa is spicy enough it would also be fine on a cold shelf or in a cooler for a few days after opening. The same may be true for some cheese dips because cheese is basically an old fashioned way to preserve milk before we had refrigerators.

If it were me, I would put a portion in a small bowl or cup to dip chips in and place the clean container on the cold shelf. I would not dip chips in the container and then store it, even if I had a fridge.

Try a few different approaches until you find an answer you are happy with and feel it constitutes fine dining. I ate cold prep ramen with a variety of different veggies up to twice a day for MONTHS in one of my poverty-housing apartments and never felt bored or like this was a compromise. 

Footnote 

The gourmet frozen pizza may have been by Wolfgang Puck. Here is an article saying the USDA gave him a hard time about his no pizza sauce pizzas.

Also, because of my medical condition, I basically don't do leftovers. If you have no fridge, you cook as much as you expect to eat in one sitting. If you are used to cooking extra and storing leftovers, you will need to adjust your habits -- though you can cook things like flat bread in batches ahead of time and keep some dry goods of that sort for a few days.