*Afterthoughts & addenda* *Preheating the flask* Yeah that would help and is something I always do, when I'm not trying to be as frugal as possible. *Heat lost vs consumed* I think I'll repeat this with different flasks and also test how much heat reduction there is when the flask is just filled with boiling water for several hours. Obviously things like the denaturing of proteins into their cooked consistency, is a chemical process, and may actually 'consume' heat, reducing the overall temperature
Also the breakdown of starches into sugars and proteins into peptides (both flavor enhancers) is an endothermic process, so you won't get quite as tasty food.
Denaturing of proteins was where my mind went when you said some types of cooking may require the input of heat throughout. It would make sense why the rice pudding didn't turn out, as there's a lot of starch conversion going on in something like that.
After years of eating overcooked mush from a thermos for lunch in grade school, I’ve thought about experimenting with deliberately undercooking food before packing it up to let the ingredients slowly come up to temperature in the locker until lunchtime. Now, many years later, I happen to stumble upon Atomic Shrimp conducting the experiment I was never able to fulfill as a kid… this is why I love this channel so damn much.
@@HomelessPank Your improper use of abbreviations is giving me a headache, let me scribe what you said into full words, "damn lazy kids today shake my head my head". This is as bad as people saying "in IRL".
I’ve done a lot of hay-box cooking. The possible reason for your rice pudding and 2nd soup not cooking was because you put cold ingredients into a cold flask. I get best results when I pre-heat the flask, bring the ingredients to a boil and use a flask that is the approximate size for the food (full flasks keep hotter than half full ones). I would love to see you experiment with a traditional type of hay-box, ie. a box full of tightly packed hay around your favourite cooking pot, and with a lid of tightly packed hay (I use a carrier bag). To use, bring your ingredients to the boil in the pan and once on a rolling boil, put it in the hay-box. I love porridge done this way, but the oats become looser after being left overnight. Soups, stews and casseroles are marvellous done this way too. Potatoes and other veggies take approximately four hours to fully soften. Food safety rules say that food is safe if it is kept at 64* or above, which is about 24 hours in a tightly packed hay-box. Billie.
This is the one page where I watch videos on topics that, before I saw the video, I never imagined I would ever think to watch. The kicker is I actually enjoy the videos.
For 20 years we have cooked our thanksgiving turkey for 2 hours. Then set the pan on a wooden cutting board on the counter. Covered in tinfoil and 3 blankets. 2-3 hours later it is perfect to carve and serve. We use that 2-3 hours cooking sides in the now available oven.
I make the Bon Appetite's Best Thanksgiving Turkey recipe. The turkey is broken down into legs, wings, and torso and placed on rack placed in a large baking sheet.The turkey is dry brined and then refrigerated, uncovered, for 24-48 hours. It's brought to brought to room temperature for 2-3 hours before cooking it on a wire rack placed on the cooksheet. This allows ALL of the skin to get crispy and beautiful. The oven temp is 425 degree F for part of the cooking time and then it's turned down to 300 degrees F. It's cooked for 1 to 1 1/2 hours total and then rested for 30-60 minutes. Cutting the turkey into smaller parts allows you to cook each piece to it's perfection rather than letting the breast dry out while waiting for the legs to reach 165. The turkey is hands down the best turkey i've ever had and everyone who has shared a Thanksgiving meal with us has said the same thing. The recipe was created several years ago as part of their TH-cam channel series developing the best Thanksgiving meal. The team split into 2-member teams and developed an entire meal of delicious food. The series is fun to watch as they work through their goals for the dish and then test out different versions as they work toward the best version. The garlic mashed potatoes are INSANE and I don't even like mashed potatoes and the gravy- OMG it's divine. It's a lot of work but it's so good and can be made several days ahead- the recipes include instructions on how many days ahead each dish can be made. I haven't made the other recipes simply because we have family favorites that I have to make and a nephew with a nut allergy. For the entire TH-cam series: th-cam.com/video/GhxEr2-sA2I/w-d-xo.html For the entire Bon Appetite print article www.bonappetit.com/gallery/absolutely-perfect-thanksgiving-menu?_ga=2.269054712.885429527.1652008154-363131446.1652008153 For the turkey recipe www.bonappetit.com/recipe/expertly-spiced-and-glazed-roast-turkey
@@daneekaplan4284 Interesting concept for cooking turkey but a bit complicated for me. I just stumble into the kitchen at 6 am, take the plastic off and innards out before putting the whole turkey in the oven at 325 degrees, as is. When the sides are done it's time to check the internal temp and put food on the table.
i'm experienced in this. preheating the flask is critical in starting out with maximum temp. soak rice and other grains beforehand. anything you plan to cook must be brought to a boil as you did the first time. lastly, wrap the entire flask in a warm blanket. thank you very much! great video.
I feel like there's an excellent challenge series waiting to be made that focuses on methods of cooking rather than a limited budget. Maybe something along the lines of a limited energy challenge, or limited utensils? I'm sure if there's a good idea in there somewhere you'll find it anyway. Thanks for another brilliant video, Mike!
In my local town yesterday there was a "street food festival" in the high street with lots of stalls and the missus and I grabbed something to eat. I chose a "New York Deli" stall and ordered a salt beef, sauerkraut and gherkin sandwich on rye bread. As the guy was finishing making it, he put a slice of cheese on top of the filling and proceeded to melt it with a blowtorch for about 30 seconds or so. I've seen chefs use blowtorches on creme brulee to caramelise the sugar on top but never to melt cheese - and the sandwich tasted really good to. So let me suggest a "blowtorch" as a cooking utensil in your challenge.
Paleolithic and primitive peoples heat rocks up in fires and then drop the scorching hot rocks into either natural or carved stone basins full of water. The rocks will heat the water until it eventually brings it up to a boiling temperature. This can not only serve as a way to purify water (by keeping it boiling by removing stones after they've cooled, and adding hot stones in their place), but was probably the first way that soups and stews were made, before the improvisation of skin and hide cooking vessels. Then, later, clay and horn before, eventually, ceramic and metal.
A camping stove with a gas canister and scales, or an electric hot plate plugged into a power meter would enable you to know exactly how much energy was used to cook, I suppose.
Really interesting video and being a dane I was really hoping you would bring up rice pudding. Here in Denmark ricepudding (or risengrød) is one of the foods commonly known to have been cooked in a box of hay (høkasse) in the past. It was quite common for poor cityfolk to use their bed and duvets instead of a høkasse. Not only was their food cooked with less fuel (thereby reducing its cost) but their beds were also slightly warmer by the time they hit the hay (pun intended). Not going to get too technical, but cooking food in an enclosed system is a suprisingly interesting and complex topic. If we use the rice pudding as an example. I assume there would be less overall energy in the system if you poured hot milk on cold rice as opposed to heating the rice and milk up together in a pan and then pouring it into the thermos. The amount of food also has an impact. A larger quantity of food holds significantly more heat energy and would lose it more slowly due to the smaller surface area in relation to volume. Even the shape of the system is significant, with a perfect sphere being most efficient, although not the most ergonomic.
I have a Wonderbag which is from South Africa, a slow cooker without the heat. I usually bring the rice or lentils or whatever to the boil on the hob then wrap the pan in a cloth (for spills) and transfer it into the bag and leave for an hour or two. The construction is a large flat disc of padded fabric that you gather up around the pot with a smaller disc to put over the lid of the pot to fully enclose your pan. It works brilliantly and hours later the pan is still too hot to touch(especially if it's full and contains a lot of liquid). I believe the Wonderbag is used a lot in South Africa where you can't access power (there are load shedding power blackouts regularly), if you start the meal off at home and need to transport it to work, or to just help reduce fuel costs. I don't use it often but my energy bills have gone up so perhaps I will use it more.
We often use food thermos's when staying in hotels. We just have a basic breakfast (porridge). We boil a kettle. add the dry porridge to the flask and add water (add milk powder if wanted but we don't). Stir, seal and go get showered. When are dressed open and eat! always still too hot. Made soups the same way. Many thermos's sold today are rubbish and the first thing we did was to fill them with boiling water and seal. Then see how hot the water was after so many hours. The 'cheap (but not always in cost) only lasted a hour and the contents were tepid. The best we got five or six hours out of.
At a hotel😳!! .Its the only place I'm allowed a full English as someone else is cooking it! Mind you the next day I'm down to scrambled eggs. Reminds me of a skiing holiday in Switzerland. We were reduced to stocking up at breakfast with bread, cold meats cheese etc and making sandwiches in the mountain cafe at lunchtime!
@@alanguile8945 lol Unfortunately since becoming disabled partly with auto immune conditions (lupus/fibro), I suffer from eating any animal proteins so eat Whole food plant based. Every so often I 'cheat' but suffer for days after. This last week I had fish chips and mushy peas whilst on holiday. Suffered for two days after with inflamed joints and LOTS of pain. Hey ho! lol
@@salan3 We don't appreciate how precious being able to eat (and taste) what we want to. My mother lost her sense of smell/taste completely and used her memory of how things tasted to make sense of the food. You really wanted the fish and chips and paid the price. I feel for you, keep safe.
@@salan3 i can understand the cheat day haha, just found out im lactose intolerant at 22😅 just came out of nowhere this year, dairy was once a daily thing and now i need to prepare ahead of time for a single cup of tea
Reminds me of the "wonderbag", a south african invention for pretty much exactly what you tried to do in the video. Maybe closer to the hay box original though. I wonder what could be done using a pressure cooking pot (for super-heating) and such an insulating shell around it.
Thank you I came to look for the name of this and knew someone could remind me of the correct name ! Also if you buy one the donate one to a family who could benefit from one
Traditionally, Icelandic rye bread was baked by putting the prepared loaf in a hole in geothermally heated soil and covering it. Plenty of hot ground in Iceland!
My aunt used to do this with my uncles and cousins lunches during harvest. Soup/stew and sandwiches were pretty much the norm on a daily basis. Boil up a big pot of "stuff" and divide it amongst 3 thermos'. By the time lunch rolls around, everything is cooked and still hot. Learned so much about simplifying the process, and cooking in general, from her and my grandma. Thankfully I had better options than my mom to learn from (she overcooked everything). XD
Have you ever thought about a career reading audiobooks? Your voice is SO FREAKING RELAXING but still your rythm of speach makes everything super „colourful“. Sorry, I wouldn‘t even know how to describe it in my mother tongue. And I love, how you seem to love that particular t-shirt. Xx
I made a "hay box" about 15 years ago, from a cardboard box and an old duvet for insulation. I could fit a very large pan (with two small side handles) in there. I was cooking for a family of five, and I often cooked more than was needed for one meal. The insulation provided by the duvet was quite good but could have been better. After several hours, the food was generally just about cooked but was no longer hot enough to cook any further. I would usually put the pan back on the cooker for a few minutes to bring it to a boil. Food doesn't thicken much cooking this way, so I would sometimes add a slurry of cornflour and water to thicken it at the end. If the food looked a bit anaemic, I would sometimes add gravy granules instead, which would colour and thicken it at the same time. I'm sure we saved a bit of money, but the main advantage was that I didn't need to keep returning to the pan to stir it and stop the contents from burning. I could go out for the day and spend a few minutes finishing off a nice hot meal when I got home, instead of having to prepare and cook the whole thing. Also, with this method, you don't get a room full of steam and loads of condensation on the windows in winter. It's worth experimenting with this method. It's good in winter, when most of us tend to cook more soups and stews. It's also worth experimenting with different insulators. I just used what I had. It cost me nothing. I'm not sure it would be worth spending a lot of money on a box.
You can get 'thermal' ovens which are basically a big flasks, with specific pots that are designed to fit inside them so as well as the heat of the food you get the heat stored in the pot. They are really effective!
@@AmbrosiusVanDerCastel There's one called a Dreampot - I don't know if they're still available new. But I have one and it's brilliant. If you search for Thermal Cooker you will find some others like the Billyboil and the Ecopot which seem to do the same thing.
Shuttle chef thermos cookers are also brilliant. Google and TH-cam to find information. When camping I’d cook Thai green chicken curry in the large pot and rice or quinoa in the smaller pot. Both pots containing the boiled food were then placed in the outer thermos casing and then into a padded bag. We’d drive all day with the thermo cooker and arrive at camp about 5 pm and have a delicious hot meal ready and waiting for us. 🇦🇺🦘🦘🇦🇺
One thought would be to preheat the flask with boiling water before adding the hot ingredients. That way the food would not loose heat to the body of the flask.
This was very interesting semantically, and practically - thanks. I think I would have added the lentils and cracked wheat to the heating pan at the end to raise them to a higher temperature. Some of the hot stew could be used to heat the flask before returning it very briefly to the pan. Energy saving anecdote - There's a YT canal boat channel where the couple live on one boat and run a coffee and cake cafe business from another. They bake their own cakes. They found that a full sized cake takes about 90 minutes to fully cook in their oven (possible electric), but if they divide the same quantity of cake mixture across a 12 compartment tray, baking is reduced to only 30 minutes. That's a significant difference. The size of the food to be cooked makes a big difference to the energy needed. There's also the issue of texture - peas cook quicker than potatoes, for example and being a vegan should require less cooking energy than than being a carnivore. I'll shut up now ...
Haybox cooking is the best way to make traditional Danish rice pudding. 3dl water and 3dl pudding rice in a pot, bring to a boil and keep boiling for 2 minutes while stirring, add 1 liter of whole milk and a quarter teaspoon of salt, bring back to boiling while stirring, when it boils, put lid on and put in haybox, leave for 60-90 minutes depending on how runny or firm you want the final dish. Serve with cinnamon sugar and butter, for drink have a mørk hvidtøl (a sweet liquorish-like Danish small beer)
This reminded me of some high school shenanigans. In Taiwan, we are required to do a "late night study session" where we went to school at 7:30AM to 5:00 PM, but we'd have to stay for late night study till 9:00PM to prepare for the big college exam (it's insane). But I remember how on one day earlier in the day we had a cooking class where we learned how to make spaghetti. And so when late night study time comes around, a kid got hungry and had the brilliant idea to make spaghetti in his thermos bottle using the extra ingredients from the class earlier. He filled it up with hot water and started soaking the pasta in it, while he prepped other stuff secretly in his drawer. He was even really fancy with it, slicing up garlic with a box cutter and adding it along to the thermos with jarred sauce. Though in the end, he added way too much salt and couldn't eat it at all. It was really fucking funny to watch and made the session more bearable, though!
Jesus fucking christ when people say "nine to five" they don't mean it's the time you have *outside* of school/work. Here in Hong Kong our culture puts a lot of weight on academics but even here that would be considered completely insane outside of cramming like the week before exams.
Very interesting topic - one benefit of the hay box approach is the added thermal mass of the cooking pot going into the box along with the food which isn’t available with the vacuum flask. Btw- does anyone else remember seeing actor Vincent Price cooking salmon on the engine block of his car ?
Dishwasher Trout recipe by Vincent Price. th-cam.com/video/xtxOdDsWwS8/w-d-xo.html Not sure about Vincent cooking on an engine, however Gordon Ramsay did it here th-cam.com/video/o9vhGiSL904/w-d-xo.html cook on mate.
I used to fix breakfast this way for the days I worked. I would place rolled oats or other rolled grains, almond butter, brown sugar and cinnamon with boiling water in a wide mouth thermos the night before. Once filled, I would gently shake the thermos and lay it on its side overnight. It was always ready to eat the next morning after a little stir. In winter I would preheat the thermos with hot tap water for 15 minutes so the hot cereal was more creamy than toothy.
I've got a thermos flask, but I just use it to bring soup to work (I got used to having soup every lunch over the pandemic, and I'm not giving that up). One tip that was included with the thermos was to first put warm water into it to warm the thermos before putting warm food in. I guess this means the flask itself won't absorb as much warmth from the food because it's already absorbed heat from the water. I haven't tested the difference with and without the water, though.
Same principle as warming the teapot (or your mug) before you make tea. It would take a little more energy to heat the extra water but the cooking temperature for the food would be higher.
It really does make a difference, you don't even need to fill it to the top, just maybe 1/3, then swish it around a bit, pop the lid on, till you're ready to fill the flask. Then pour out the water.
With the second and third experiments, I’m hearing Ruth Goodman from Wartime Farm saying “and it does need to be rapidly boiling” about the meal she was about to cook in a hay box. Pouring boiling water over cold ingredients would immediately reduce the temperature to perhaps a simmering temp, rather than a rapid boil, so you’re not getting that initial temp high enough. I bet if you boiled the milk on the stove with the rice in it, the rice pudding would have worked. And of course if you had a lid on your little pot it would boil faster and maybe only take 6 minutes of gas rather than 8. I’ve been planning to try a hay box after I move. The pic you showed is super cute! I can totally picture that sitting on my future porch! I hadn’t thought about using feathers in it though. Great idea! I have 6 chickens moulting right now. That’s not enough to fill a box, but after I move I’ll probably have 20-30 or so chickens, and of course I’ll need to pluck the odd cockerel. That’s a great extra use for the feathers before they go to the compost.
I have one of those Mr. D's thermal cookers. Great piece of kit, use it all the time. The pan has a cast iron ring underneath so the food cooks even better inside the thermal cover. I particularly like how easy and quick it is too use. Throw some stuff in the pan, heat it up thoroughly, put pan inside the cover and close the lid. Go live life and enjoy a tasty hot dinner. I will definitely always have a thermal cooker in the house from now on out.
The book you may be talking about was 'The Survivor' by Kurt Saxon. One thing you may consider is turning the flask on its side. That may make it loose heat more but it would also distribute it more evenly along with the contents within. You could also consider pouring out the contents and reheating them if you know they would take long to cook. In the end it would still be less fuel used.
@@anthonyjacobs6790 Yes, I know in the old days, some people would start their porridge at bedtime, and the pot would sit on the back of the wood stove all night, and then in the morning, when you rekindled the fire, your porridge was done to creaminess.
I’ve done this many times using a Stanley stainless thermos food jar and it typically works very well. Two tips: preheat the jar/flask with boiling water a few minutes before dumping it out to pour the food in. Then, after sealing it, turn it on its side before wrapping it in a towel or bubble wrap, etc, since heat travels up. It works quite well with most grains or small legumes. It does not work with chana dal (at least the kind we get in the US) as they are apparently “super-dried” to prevent insects from being imported with them. Another great Shrimp video!
Just a thought along with the camping idea , wrap the thermos up in a sleeping bag & it will retain the heat extremely well , I use this to keep beer cool when camping and even on really hot days it works great.
It works. We cooked some of our meals that way when hiking a few years back. We used hot water bought from the DNT huts to save our fuel (and carry a little less weight, tent+stuff was already enough). Soups work very well and are great after a long hike.
I love this channel because of all its content and of course Mr. Shrimp. He’s just so damn knowledgeable and interesting. But reading through the comments is priceless. What a great sense of humour you all have. 👍
I read a couple of local recipe books from the depression era, and the haybox cooking method was recommended constantly, because there simply wasn't enough firewood to heat things up the conventional way. It blew my mind, because I had never heard or thought about such a method. What also blew my mind was the fact that there wasn't even enough firewood to go around in times of war. One of the recipe books I read was from the World War I era, and they went through some recipes using quite unconventional ingredients. The book was printed during an emergency period, in a time when there was a huge shortage of everything -- even basic foodstuffs. There were recipes using lichen and bark, and even non-food recipes were included. One inedible recipe that stuck to my mind was for boiling pigs feet, NOT for eating, but for separating the fat out of them to be used as a lubricating oil for machinery. The books I read only focused on surviving with what we have locally here in Finland, and as such, they were only printed in Finnish. I'm sure such literature exists in every language and I warmly recommend everyone to read them. The recipes from back then would still be useful today in times of famine and crisis, and learning about those times can be very eye-opening.
the "Høkasse" method is still relatively popular today for preparing Danish christmas rice pudding, often a big wooden chest stuffed with duvets, blankets, and various other linens. Usually an extreme amount of rice pudding is made the evening before for dinner/dessert, and the morning/noon after, the remains are heated up, and then transferred to the chest/box. by evening, its relatively cool, gets mixed with vanilla, whipped cream, optionally chopped almonds, and is served for christmas eve dessert.
I've been interested in old (and wartime) cookbooks for a long time, so the hay-box is a familiar concept to me. My aunt (born in 1931, so she knew scarcity in and after the war) used to put things in her bed, wrapping the lidded pot up in her blankets, to let it finish stewing. I never imagined using a thermos for it, but with the current energy prices, I'm going to build a hay-box anyway. PS: From what I know of hay-box-cooking, it's not enough to reach cooking temperature. The instructions say to maintain a good boil for a few minutes before putting the food in hay in the original cooking container.
TIL apparently a watched pot actually takes eight minutes to boil 😉 Seriously, this was a fun experiment. Reminds me of an old camping trick of placing a Dutch oven in a dirt hole and then surrounding it with fire heated stones. Thanks for sharing it.
I'd like to see you try homemade solar oven cooking and the foil packet car engine style of cooking. Both interesting methods of saving money. There's also rocket stove outdoor cooking which uses much smaller amounts of wood than an open wood fire.
My American ex mother in law used to make what is known as Hobo Dinners - foil packed & placed in the car engine. By the time you arrived at a far distant place (for them it was a tail gate parking lot party before the 'football' game about 2 to 3 hours drive time the Hobo Dinner was ready. A shorter journey's Hobo Dinner would be to have fish instead of diced meat as it cooked faster!
This is a very interesting concept. In the US, there are BBQ competitors that use a form of insulated cooking to tenderize their final dishes. They use a small insulated box (about the size of a desktop mini-fridge) paired with boiling water in a pan at the bottom. Their meats (ribs, loins, etc) are brought to the ideal internal temperature, and placed inside the container which keeps everything hot for several hours. This is enough to "slow cook" the meats until they are tender instead of using fuel.
Excellent idea, I can see many uses for this, I was thinking of putting oats, hot milk, dried fruit, nuts and a pinch of salt in a flask the night before for my breakfast... I dehydrate a lot of fruit and veg, i wonder if a variety of dry items, a stock cube, boiling water would make a good soup. Anyway, excellent video as usual sir
Be sure to boil the milk, or it might go off in this warm enviroment. You don´ t want to keep it warm to long, the food is done much faster than you think. You dont want to keep your food warm for to long, it spoils both flavour and vitamins. (Nobody would leave a pot of soup on the oven all night, not even at low temperature. ) I had a big pot of stew go from delicous to bad over night, becauce it was kept too warm.
For oats, you don't even need to heat up the ingredients for them to cook. I make overnight oats for my breakfast every day, and I just put some oats, milk, apple sauce, dried fruit, and nuts in a container and stick it in the fridge, and by the morning it's ready to eat. Stays good for up to 4 days, so I make 4 at a time. If I feel like eating it hot, I stick it in the microwave for a minute, but it's also perfectly good eaten cold.
I was disappointed with my Thermos. I was told it would keep hot things hot and cold things cold. Once lunchtime came around my soup was lukewarm and my ice cream had melted into it. Wouldn't recommend.
Perhaps you should reflash the AI. It is supposed to automatically detect if it should keep hot food hot or cold food cold. But I suppose it may sometimes get it wrong. Tech these days...
I own and use on a regular basis a 100 year old "Fireless Cooker". It has lava like insulation inside and steel inside walls. You heat up one or two soapstones (depending if you are stewing or baking). Heat up the food and put it in a locked aluminum vessel with lid. One soapstone goes on the bottom. The vessel with food on top of that and if the vessel has a pie in it where you need to bake it, a second soapstone on top. OR you can add additional vessels with locked lids. These were popular before electricity in the country so a woman could help on the farm. She could get lunch and dinner going before dawn, spend the day in the fields and have farmhouse meals for family and hands.
1) A friend, a keen swimmer, would put oats and hot milk in a flask at 6AM before going training. When he finished training at 8AM the flask contained porridge. He did this for years. 2) I had an "original" slow cooker, by Tower, from the 1970s. It ran MUCH cooler than a modern slow cooker, with much longer recommended cooking times. The instructions mention that meat will cook fine like this, but some root vegetables actually required pre-cooking. This may speak to your soup/stew results. A copy of the original Tower recipe book (by Annette Yates) might be applicable to your experiments.
I remember we had a Tower slow cooker in the 1970s. After 9 hours potatoes were still hard. As I remember, they had to recall a whole batch for being underpowered. The replacement certainly worked better
There is a modern haybox, a wonder bag, which looks excellent. I like their focus on reducing deforestation. The TH-cam Channel Sorted covered this well and made a rice pudding in one! I wonder if a flask to cook might work well for rice porridge (congee), a common food in many Asian countries. Left over cooked rice in a flask with boiling water overnight and you might have the right consistency. Not quite rice pudding but you can make a sweet version or a savoury version. The original famine food, you can feed a lot more people with rice porridge than with steamed rice
I started doing it when I was a lab technician in 1973 particularly to deal with brown rice (easy) as part of a veg soup. Later the motorcycle journey to work was long enough to cook my soups.
This was so interesting. It's something I would have tried for myself, but not with my narrow necked vacuum flask because cleaning would be a pain. I really appreciate Shrimp experiment videos for addressing the practical side of survival cooking without going off the deep-end.
Thanks for sharing! I had great success with rice, noodles and lentils. Also with some kind of dehydrated food that only needs to be prepared in boiling water. What you might want to try to improve your results is to preheat your flask. Just put in a bit of boiling water before you fill in the ingredients. Of course, empty the bottle before doing so. Good luck!
The "hay box" may work better than the thermos as the pan is holding a large thermal potential that is going in the washing up bowl. Some years ago polystyrene milk bottle insulators were available to keep doorstep deliveries cool, a version of this for the pan may be better, cheers.
I used a polystyrene lined box with a glass jar inside to make yogurt. Just heat the milk to 90 Celcius, put it in the jar, let it cool to 35 Celcius and add the starter yogurt to the milk and put the jar in the insulating box. Around eight hours later the yogurt is ready. You can make a more creamy yogurt by adding milk powder to the milk.
I've recently been given an "Ecopot" which is basically a modern haybox. It does work for lots of things but I would say that precooking is necessary for some items rather than just preheating. Pulses that had already been soaked overnight I thought would be perfect but sadly after 6 hours were still crunchy
other ways to conserve heat would be heating a really big pot. the square cube law makes big things harder to cool down just be virtue of mass and surface area. my grandmother used to boil beans in jars that way she had a electric 50L self-heating pot that she wrapped in blankets after heating up and then just left it for half a day or so. the jars had glass lids a rubber ring acting as seal. wenn the hot jars cooled down they sealed themselves by under pressureing. cooking and preserving in one and I assume it takes less energy than doing it individualy edit: i guess you could make the jars hexagonal (bestagonal) to fit perfectly :D edit2: cooking is denaturation when it come to proteins at least. you can achieve that by other means like acid (carpaccio thats called i believe) or radiation (leave it in the sun or a nuclear reactor :D)
I've cooked hemp seed and other dried grains for fishing in flasks fairly regularly over the years. The usual process is to soak for 24hrs and then boil for half an hour or so (with the addition of a little bicarbonate of soda to blacken the seed) until the seeds crack open to reveal the white inside (relatively efficient for large batches of a few kg at a time but does stink the kitchen out). If, however, you don't have time or you've simply forgotten and you only need a pint or so you can just put some dry seed in a flask (leaving room for expansion) and fill with boiling water from a kettle and leave overnight, in the morning you've got prepared hemp ready for draining and decanting into a bait box (save the water for mixing with groundbait).
I think the most convenient and effective way of saving energy while cooking is to keep the lid on the pan as much as possible. Secondly I'd say to try and boil as little water as possible, heating water to the boiling point takes a lot less energy that actually turning it in to steam does.
I've used a modern version of a haybox assembled from a large laundry basket filled with crumpled newspaper, as it worked better as filling than either blankets or pillows. It also shapes itself well to the shape of the pot, so there aren't any large air spaces around it. It worked well for making good-sized, say two to four quart, closed pots of lentils and soups so long as everything was brought to a boil for a minute or two before being bedded down in the paper, even if the paper was not particularly warm beforehand. Pouring boiling water over raw solids to cover just didn't quite do the job, as the solid bits wouldn't get hot enough long enough for the necessary chemical changes in the food. Given that in the boiling water method that you're having to bring the water to a boil anyway, having the solids heating up in the water as well shouldn't reduce efficiency much, if at all, and it gets the cooking started around 70C or so as the solution continues to heat up. Your starting out with small pieces of food also helps the process, as does soaking legumes beforehand. Split peas or French lentils might not need it, but you want to take advantage of as many ways to speed cooking as possible. Do avoid using large chunks of raw food, as they will not heat through in the time it takes to bring the broth and other ingredients to a boil. As to the question of saving money/energy, it does matter over time. A pot of lentils and veggies cooked up in ten or twelve minutes and packed away to finish cooking on its own vs that same ten or twelve minutes plus sustaining even a low input over another two to four hours adds up over the course of a week or a month.
Me too. I use a load of coats wrapped around a large pot of water at 45 degrees to incubate yogurt. When the temperature differential to the room is quite low like that, a simple arrangement like this can keep the water (and prospective yogurt) at a remarkably stable temperature for 8-12 hours quite easily, since the rate of cooling is proportional to the temperature differential.
I was wondering how I could utilise this for myself because I don't have a flask like that I have an aluminium flask for drinks but then it hit me. Mashed potatoes. The energy that goes into boiling mash is incredibly high so what if they got "cooked" in the flask over a few hours? I'll let you know later today.
if you do a little internet surfing you can find alternatives from cloth bags filled with wool or cotton batting to heating duct insulation. Just make sure your pot has a tight fitting lid.
Well the energy that goes into boiling water is incredibly high. Not into boiling potatoes. Just chop then up smaller to reduce cooking time though. Microwave is generally more efficient as well.
the new thermal cookers like the ecopot work pretty well, they are popular with the narrowboaters and motorhome/van people as it uses less fuel but also produces less steam, reducing condensate problems.
This makes me wonder how energy efficient my electric pressure cooker is. There are a few things I cook in it by getting it up to pressure and then just shutting it off to steam until the pressure releases naturally.
I remove the heat source when cooking dried pasta. If you bring the salted water to the boil, add the pasta, stir, cover, and turn off the heat, the pasta will cook in the heated water in about the same amount of time as if the water was kept on the boil. Much more economical. Learned this from a cook in an Aged Care Facility. Clearly he had to cook vast quantities of pasta at any one time, and this was the best way to do it. // Also, when I was a child, we used to visit my maternal grandmother every other Sunday for lunch. My Mum would partially cook a leg of lamb, roast beef, or whatever. She had it down to a fine art. Then she would put it in a container, wrap the whole thing in a number of towels, and sit it in the boot of the car for the journey. By the time we got there (about 45 mins) the meat would have finished cooking in it's own heat, and my grandmother would have the vegetables almost ready to eat. Gravy would be made from the juices of the meat from the container it was in. We would be sitting down to a hot and perfectly cooked roast lunch within 15-20 mins of arriving.
I recently started cooking with my microwave instead of my oven. i heard that its more more energy efficient but i never made sure. Of course youre losing maillard reactions when cooking in the microwave but at least its quick and easy. In this case the recipe is as follows: 500g unfrozen vegetables, heavily salted, maybe more spices ~250g of grated cheese mixed with ~75g of cream cheese on top 10 Minuten on high setting in the microwave, unfrozen might even require less time than hat, i'm still figuring out whats efficient and sufficient.
The microwave is definitely much more efficient than the oven - a microwave oven uses less power than a typical oven (around 1kW vs 2+kW) _and_ takes much less time. Sure, the oven doesn't use its full power constantly during cooking, but it does while it's warming up, and I can probably bake a potato in my microwave in less time than my oven takes to warm up!
You should try eggs in the microwave. You can add anything you'd put in an omelet and make it a meal. You have to cover them because they do pop, but you have eggs in less than a minute.
Very interesting video! It did make me think about one or two potential areas for improvement: Water has a very large heat capacity (pretty sure everyone knows this already). Also, the vegetables/etc will also have a large heat capacity, since they are mostly water. The 1st trial you did involved boiling everything together and then sealing it. The other trials you did involved having room temp food in the thermos and pouring boiling water into it. Of these, the 1st trial had the most heat & energy sealed away, because the vegetables were brought up to the same temperature as the water. With the other two, the food had to first find an equilibrium of temperature with the boiling water, so this will result in a lower starting temperature. Also, using salt in the first trial increased the boiling point of the water before you added it to the flask. More energy was sealed into the thermos this way too.
I often cook eggs using this method. Put one egg in the flask, pour boiling water and leave for around 15 minutes. This will give you a hard boiled egg. I may preheat the flask in winter. And no, radishes are not turnips. They are different species.
the rice pudding is often cooked with this method in norway! it's called "dynegrøt" from the covers (dyne) you wrap the heated pot in, before you put it in your bed and leave it for about 4 hours.
It's the same with boil in the bag meals, some people boil them for 10 minutes, it's better to bring them to the boil, then turn off heat leave for 5 mins then reboil and leave for another 6 or 7 mins, you'll use half the gas but get the same result. Takes slightly longer but is far more economic.
It’s also worth noting that, while rinsing the lentils may seem pointless, soaking them does help them take less time to cook, same with oats and other grains. Edit: including rice
In Girlscouts, in my youth, one time at camp we made Hay Hole Ice Cream. It seems a similar concept to the Hay Box cooking method you mentioned. We dug a big hole and lined it with hay and put our cream & sugar mixture in a sealed container into the hole. Then we put more hay and some dirt over the container. For good measure, we covered the hay hole with a tarp. I suppose the tarp kept things tidy, but mainly it marked where we had dug our hay hole. The ice cream turned out lovely.
What about trying the boil in a pressure cooker, the temperature at the "flasking" stage will be higher so it should be hotter at the end of 5/6 hours maybe?
As soon as you depressurise a pressure cooker the temperature of the liquid will drop back to open pan boiling temperature. So you cannot add extra heat to the Thermos this way and you will have used extra energy raising the food up to its pressure boiling temperature, lost when you depressurise.
@@Gribbo9999 Yes that's true, of course you are right. Once the cooker reached pressure you could allow the pressure to release naturally though, then contents into the Thermos. That could be worth a test
@@paulwomack5866 Yes when the stuff goes into the vacuum flask it will be, but at the point the cooker reaches pressure it will be at or near 121 degrees C. A slow release of pressure (heat off) may keep the stuff at above normal boiling point for longer necessitating a shorter cooking time in the flask and a hotter product at the end of the total cooking time. I have no idea if any of this will achieve anything but it seems on topic with the content of the video and worth a try perhaps?
Haybox cooking works really well! As I routinely cook Sunday roast but we are eating at my dad‘s place due to him not being mobile, when I want to bake a whole goose (5ish kg) that takes longer than we are at his place, I start baking it at home for 1,5-2h, wrap it up in silicone baking mats, blankets and put it in a washing basket. We move it to my dads place which takes 1- 1,5h (out of oven time) and put it back into the oven. This shortens the ‚adding heat‘ cooking time calculated by weight by half the time it was out of the oven and I feel even keeps the goose more moist.
I've been cooking at home for decades, but I only discovered in the past couple of years that when you cook a pan of boiled rice, you don't have to simmer away all of the water for 20 minutes - just do so for 10 minutes and then leave it off the heat with the pan lid on for a further 10 minutes, at which point it will have absorbed most of the water and be fully cooked.
I typically add the rice and boiling water, bring it back to the boil in the pan then turn it off and leave the lid on. The rice will cook without any additional heat. It takes a bit longer, maybe half an hour. I usually walk the dog while it's sitting and it's done when I get home. Sometimes I put a tea cosy over the pan and it keeps it all piping hot while I prepare everything else if I'm making a particularly long winded meal.
@@Shakedown180 The "long winded" meals tend to be the best ones! With that said, clearly as a cook yourself, have you ever had that situation where you've spent such a long time running around preparing a really good meal that by the time you serve it up and sit down with everyone else to eat it, you no longer feel hungry?
@@terrydaktyllus1320 This happens far too often! If we have people over and I try to cook an extravagant meal i find I've got no appetite after trying to keep the kitchen running smoothly while entertaining!
I recently did an article on this, over a decade after I bought an "As seen on TV Pasta" variant and came up with this very idea. 1st let me say, you are going to get people sick if they follow this without some major modifications for Slow Cooking. As someone mentioned, 1st mistake is not pre warming your thermos. Next mistake was using a cheap thermos to begin with. The problem with your particular thermos is that the heat dissipates for too fast. In my research, and what I currently use, Stanley 1913 brand is the only Thermos that I would trust for this method of cooking. I have had a cup of warm coffee 24 hours after I originally filed my Stanley 1913 food storage thermos. Of the other 10 or so food container thermos brands i have tried, all lost their heat many, many hours compared to Stanley 1913. I own 4 of their thermos containers. Both my ex of 28 years and my stepmother were nutritionists, and I am an avid self proclaimed chef, and the major issue you have here is that you are too close to the food danger zone temperature, and for pork, it needs to be 145°F, of which your food was 143°F, & was that temperature for almost 1 hour prior to opening. If that was chicken, you would be sending people to the hospital. This would best work with pork or beef. My suggestion is to buy a Stanley 1913 24+ oz food container, preheat it with boiling water and close it up, when your food your cooking hits boiling temperature, pour out the boiling water from thermos, and IMMEDIATELY pour in the food and close it tight. You do not have time to add anything else during this step. You will not need to add additional insulation with it, as this is the best thermos brand on the market. Remember never ever use this Slow Cook method for seafood or for chicken, the risk of death/illness is just too great.
I always preheat the inside of my flask with boiling water before I put my coffee in. It keeps the coffee much hotter for much longer that way. I bet it would help the cooking too.
Excellent video! I just realized there are actual thermos pots designed exactly for that purpose! I just searched google for insulated slow cookers and found all sorts of pots
My family has used this method for cooking rice since the seventies. My mom woul bring the rice pot to boil, then "put it to bed". In Germany we have duvets, so she would stick it under the covers to keep it warm. I found the bed part a bit complicated, so I cover the rice pot with a thick towel. Works a treat!!! But don t waste time waiting around 6 hours, at least the rice is done in 30 minutes. I tried this method for cooking stews in a pressure cooker, and it reduces not only cooking time, but also the energy bill. For even more efficiency, food safety (meats) and better flavor (onions and cabbage), fry or saute the ingredients in fat shortly, bevor adding your water or stock, and any pulses. The finer you are chopping, the less it needs cooking. You can shorten the cooking time of beans, chick peas and lentils by soaking them overnight before you cook them. (not necessary for dhal) Oh, and the ammount of residue heat changes according to you portions. Large portions retain a lot of residue heat, small portions are less optimal. Cooking for several people conserves energy.
I could see this working well as a kind of hybrid cooking techniques that would remove the need for something like a slow cooker that's just ticking away all day. Prepare the food as you did I'm the beginning, then when you reach whatever time, throw the contents back in a pan and reheat back up to serving temperature. With a big enough insulated vessel, you could even go back every hour or 2, reheat it back to boiling and back in again. In theory cheaper than a slow cooker ticking away all day losing heat through the lid etc.
Vietnamese Pho uses this principle to some extent. One of the ingredients of the dish are raw strips of thin meat which are cooked by the latent heat of the hot broth that's poured on top of the other ingredients when the dish is assembled.
If you want to reduce the cooking time of certain ingredients, like the wheat or things like that, maybe it's worth to leave them soaking before hand for a few hours. That should reduce the cooking time quite a bit.
I cooked chickpeas in the SHO 800ml thermos flask & loved it. I preheated it with hot tap water & boiled ½ C of unsoaked chickpeas for 5 minutes in a Dash Express Hot Pot. Dash mini appliances are another great way to minimize electric costs & are fun. After 10 hours in the flask, the temperature was 143F/62C.They were fully cooked; but firm with a bit of texture.
During the war we used hay boxes to do the same thing. They cooked stuff wonderfully well. You might like to try creating one they are very easy to make. A wooden box and hay for insulation with news paper in between. We had to be inventive when resources were in short supply. It would cook a soup stew rice pudding or anything that needs long slow cooking
Some wires crossed in my brain when I saw this video, thought it was about cooking shrimp in a flask. For half the video I was wondering where the seafood came into the picture.
Just watched your vid on tv and thought i would comment, for some years now we have heated water on our wood stove and filled flasks with boiling water, next morning fill a cup with the water and tickle through in the electric kettle, its not cooking but it saves a little on the bills, cheers Dave
For any future experiments, I can tell you that quinoa can be cooked in a thermos flask. I used to fairly regularly put quinoa and a few spices in my food flask (it was a small, one-meal one) and top it off with boiling water in the morning. I'd shake it a couple of times throughout the morning and by lunchtime it was nicely cooked and still hot. I don't think I ever tried anything more complicated but this video definitely makes me want to revisit the idea.
Atomic Shrimp is also a superb cultural ambassador for Britain - but I wouldn't be able to get to sleep while watching his videos. I recommend tuning in to the BBC World Service radio to help you sleep.
That pot in hay reminds me of the time my mom cooked milk rice (sweet dish but we ate it as a lunch main with e.g. hot cherries and/or vanilla sauce). After the milk with rice boiled up, the whole pot was transferred into my parent's bed (conveniently located on the ground floor) and tucked in under the blankets and day blanket (like a very thin, decorative duvet?). There the rice was allowed to soak, swell, amd soften for the hours it took for us coming back from school.
I played about a few years ago with 'freezer bag cooking'. Basically the same thing here, but pouring boiling water into a premix in a bag. Then loading it into an insulated pouch. Had some success, more failures. Rice was one of the failures.
Great vid, thanks! Rice is tricky. May I suggest this, a common shortcut for making Cantonese-style congee (rice porridge) in 20 min as opposed to 2-3 hrs. The night before, pour twice-rinsed rice (60g / pers, you still want some starch on it) into a freezer bag w. a little oil and salt. Freeze overnight. The next day, the classical method says to bring stock or water to a boil, add frozen rice, simmer 10 mn and then add aromatics and possibly bits of fish, or a thousand-year egg (alkaline I think, helps breaking up the rice), and wait until it boils again, at which point it is cooked. I'm wondering whether congee would cook if you defrosted the rice at room temp, poured everything in at the first boiling point (like your soup) and transferred to the flask. Anyhow, looking forward to the sequel(s).
There are multiple ways to reduce the fuel consumption. For gas burners, you can use a pot skirt to keep the fire and it's heat going alongside the pot instead of going to the sides. Once you cooked it, you can use fireless cookers or thermal cooker similarly to how you use a thermos. Bonus points for using a solar cooker, ideally a home-made one which you to make using either printer paper or a cheap tarp, epoxy resin for binding, and food-grade aluminium foil, to make sheets which to concentrate sunlight, ideally with a few pinholes through which a drop of epoxy to ooze out or be applied, to hook the tinfoil from both sides. A thermal cooker is a thermos the size of a pot, inside which you can place a pot to keep it hot for longer. The lower-tech version would be to use pillows and blankets and quilts or whatever else you have available, to keep the pot hot for longer, just not as long as with a thermal cooker (pot-sized thermos). All in all, I very much like the idea of cooking in a thermos. Might even be worth buying a few more thermoses to cook a bigger meal inside it, and use something like heated metals to effectively bake things inside the thermos, especially with aid from some wire and small/tiny metal plates which to keep in place like on a grill, or using the thermos sideways with metal sheets used as trays or baking trays modified for cooking in a thermos. I recommend the LowTechMagazine website, the article called "If We Insulate Our Houses, Why Not Our Cooking Pots?", for more info, and relevant images. Indoor solar cooking is also interesting, regardless of whether the greenhouse-like thing is in the house or outside, the solar concentrator looking like a satellite dish with a mirror finish.
*Afterthoughts & addenda*
*Preheating the flask* Yeah that would help and is something I always do, when I'm not trying to be as frugal as possible.
*Heat lost vs consumed* I think I'll repeat this with different flasks and also test how much heat reduction there is when the flask is just filled with boiling water for several hours. Obviously things like the denaturing of proteins into their cooked consistency, is a chemical process, and may actually 'consume' heat, reducing the overall temperature
Can't wait for another version of this
Also the breakdown of starches into sugars and proteins into peptides (both flavor enhancers) is an endothermic process, so you won't get quite as tasty food.
What a great idea! I love seeing experiments repeated in different versions and finding out what changes.
Denaturing of proteins was where my mind went when you said some types of cooking may require the input of heat throughout. It would make sense why the rice pudding didn't turn out, as there's a lot of starch conversion going on in something like that.
What about a flask that has a heating element to continuously add heat throughout the process?
After years of eating overcooked mush from a thermos for lunch in grade school, I’ve thought about experimenting with deliberately undercooking food before packing it up to let the ingredients slowly come up to temperature in the locker until lunchtime. Now, many years later, I happen to stumble upon Atomic Shrimp conducting the experiment I was never able to fulfill as a kid… this is why I love this channel so damn much.
Interesting that a question you had years ago has now been answered and you didn't have to do anything.
@@hollygolightly8970 damn lazy kids today smh my head
@@HomelessPank Your improper use of abbreviations is giving me a headache, let me scribe what you said into full words,
"damn lazy kids today shake my head my head".
This is as bad as people saying "in IRL".
@@HomelessPank rude
@@HomelessPank As a damn lazy kid, I thought the same thing about catgirls becoming real. Then Japan did it again with vtubers.
“What is cooking?”- a question i tentatively ponder as i dump a packet of radioactive orange cheese powder into my cup of microwaved noodles…
'murica
Me when I dump too much shredded cheese onto my microwaveable pasta and sauce, making the food too strong in taste
Two words - "tentatively ponder", makes this a rather marvellous comment.
Wait, is the cheese powder orange _and_ radioactive, or is the cheese powder radioactive-orange-coloured?
Please disambiguate.
@@MuscarV2 'MURICA! FUCK YEAH!
The only thing I would have done slightly differently, I would have rinsed out the flask with boiling water so the food was going into a hot flask.
Yeah, I would normally do that with the flask but I felt like it would invalidate the cost saving
@@AtomicShrimp you could keep the rinse water and make a cup of coffee.
@@pauleverett982 good idea!
@@AtomicShrimp maybe you could also put the water back in pot and heat it again with the soup ingredients?
@@AtomicShrimp Maybe just freeze the hot water for later use?
I’ve done a lot of hay-box cooking.
The possible reason for your rice pudding and 2nd soup not cooking was because you put cold ingredients into a cold flask.
I get best results when I pre-heat the flask, bring the ingredients to a boil and use a flask that is the approximate size for the food (full flasks keep hotter than half full ones).
I would love to see you experiment with a traditional type of hay-box, ie. a box full of tightly packed hay around your favourite cooking pot, and with a lid of tightly packed hay (I use a carrier bag).
To use, bring your ingredients to the boil in the pan and once on a rolling boil, put it in the hay-box.
I love porridge done this way, but the oats become looser after being left overnight.
Soups, stews and casseroles are marvellous done this way too.
Potatoes and other veggies take approximately four hours to fully soften.
Food safety rules say that food is safe if it is kept at 64* or above, which is about 24 hours in a tightly packed hay-box.
Billie.
This is the one page where I watch videos on topics that, before I saw the video, I never imagined I would ever think to watch. The kicker is I actually enjoy the videos.
For 20 years we have cooked our thanksgiving turkey for 2 hours. Then set the pan on a wooden cutting board on the counter. Covered in tinfoil and 3 blankets. 2-3 hours later it is perfect to carve and serve.
We use that 2-3 hours cooking sides in the now available oven.
I make the Bon Appetite's Best Thanksgiving Turkey recipe. The turkey is broken down into legs, wings, and torso and placed on rack placed in a large baking sheet.The turkey is dry brined and then refrigerated, uncovered, for 24-48 hours. It's brought to brought to room temperature for 2-3 hours before cooking it on a wire rack placed on the cooksheet. This allows ALL of the skin to get crispy and beautiful. The oven temp is 425 degree F for part of the cooking time and then it's turned down to 300 degrees F. It's cooked for 1 to 1 1/2 hours total and then rested for 30-60 minutes. Cutting the turkey into smaller parts allows you to cook each piece to it's perfection rather than letting the breast dry out while waiting for the legs to reach 165. The turkey is hands down the best turkey i've ever had and everyone who has shared a Thanksgiving meal with us has said the same thing. The recipe was created several years ago as part of their TH-cam channel series developing the best Thanksgiving meal. The team split into 2-member teams and developed an entire meal of delicious food. The series is fun to watch as they work through their goals for the dish and then test out different versions as they work toward the best version. The garlic mashed potatoes are INSANE and I don't even like mashed potatoes and the gravy- OMG it's divine. It's a lot of work but it's so good and can be made several days ahead- the recipes include instructions on how many days ahead each dish can be made. I haven't made the other recipes simply because we have family favorites that I have to make and a nephew with a nut allergy.
For the entire TH-cam series: th-cam.com/video/GhxEr2-sA2I/w-d-xo.html For the entire Bon Appetite print article www.bonappetit.com/gallery/absolutely-perfect-thanksgiving-menu?_ga=2.269054712.885429527.1652008154-363131446.1652008153
For the turkey recipe www.bonappetit.com/recipe/expertly-spiced-and-glazed-roast-turkey
@@daneekaplan4284 Interesting concept for cooking turkey but a bit complicated for me. I just stumble into the kitchen at 6 am, take the plastic off and innards out before putting the whole turkey in the oven at 325 degrees, as is. When the sides are done it's time to check the internal temp and put food on the table.
i'm experienced in this. preheating the flask is critical in starting out with maximum temp. soak rice and other grains beforehand. anything you plan to cook must be brought to a boil as you did the first time. lastly, wrap the entire flask in a warm blanket. thank you very much! great video.
I feel like there's an excellent challenge series waiting to be made that focuses on methods of cooking rather than a limited budget. Maybe something along the lines of a limited energy challenge, or limited utensils? I'm sure if there's a good idea in there somewhere you'll find it anyway. Thanks for another brilliant video, Mike!
In my local town yesterday there was a "street food festival" in the high street with lots of stalls and the missus and I grabbed something to eat. I chose a "New York Deli" stall and ordered a salt beef, sauerkraut and gherkin sandwich on rye bread. As the guy was finishing making it, he put a slice of cheese on top of the filling and proceeded to melt it with a blowtorch for about 30 seconds or so.
I've seen chefs use blowtorches on creme brulee to caramelise the sugar on top but never to melt cheese - and the sandwich tasted really good to.
So let me suggest a "blowtorch" as a cooking utensil in your challenge.
Paleolithic and primitive peoples heat rocks up in fires and then drop the scorching hot rocks into either natural or carved stone basins full of water. The rocks will heat the water until it eventually brings it up to a boiling temperature. This can not only serve as a way to purify water (by keeping it boiling by removing stones after they've cooled, and adding hot stones in their place), but was probably the first way that soups and stews were made, before the improvisation of skin and hide cooking vessels. Then, later, clay and horn before, eventually, ceramic and metal.
A camping stove with a gas canister and scales, or an electric hot plate plugged into a power meter would enable you to know exactly how much energy was used to cook, I suppose.
Really interesting video and being a dane I was really hoping you would bring up rice pudding. Here in Denmark ricepudding (or risengrød) is one of the foods commonly known to have been cooked in a box of hay (høkasse) in the past. It was quite common for poor cityfolk to use their bed and duvets instead of a høkasse. Not only was their food cooked with less fuel (thereby reducing its cost) but their beds were also slightly warmer by the time they hit the hay (pun intended).
Not going to get too technical, but cooking food in an enclosed system is a suprisingly interesting and complex topic.
If we use the rice pudding as an example. I assume there would be less overall energy in the system if you poured hot milk on cold rice as opposed to heating the rice and milk up together in a pan and then pouring it into the thermos.
The amount of food also has an impact. A larger quantity of food holds significantly more heat energy and would lose it more slowly due to the smaller surface area in relation to volume. Even the shape of the system is significant, with a perfect sphere being most efficient, although not the most ergonomic.
I have a Wonderbag which is from South Africa, a slow cooker without the heat. I usually bring the rice or lentils or whatever to the boil on the hob then wrap the pan in a cloth (for spills) and transfer it into the bag and leave for an hour or two. The construction is a large flat disc of padded fabric that you gather up around the pot with a smaller disc to put over the lid of the pot to fully enclose your pan. It works brilliantly and hours later the pan is still too hot to touch(especially if it's full and contains a lot of liquid). I believe the Wonderbag is used a lot in South Africa where you can't access power (there are load shedding power blackouts regularly), if you start the meal off at home and need to transport it to work, or to just help reduce fuel costs. I don't use it often but my energy bills have gone up so perhaps I will use it more.
Just when insomnia is kicking my butt, you upload. At least now I don’t have to be wide awake AND bored. Thanks!
We often use food thermos's when staying in hotels. We just have a basic breakfast (porridge). We boil a kettle. add the dry porridge to the flask and add water (add milk powder if wanted but we don't). Stir, seal and go get showered. When are dressed open and eat! always still too hot. Made soups the same way. Many thermos's sold today are rubbish and the first thing we did was to fill them with boiling water and seal. Then see how hot the water was after so many hours. The 'cheap (but not always in cost) only lasted a hour and the contents were tepid. The best we got five or six hours out of.
At a hotel😳!! .Its the only place I'm allowed a full English as someone else is cooking it! Mind you the next day I'm down to scrambled eggs. Reminds me of a skiing holiday in Switzerland. We were reduced to stocking up at breakfast with bread, cold meats cheese etc and making sandwiches in the mountain cafe at lunchtime!
@@alanguile8945 lol Unfortunately since becoming disabled partly with auto immune conditions (lupus/fibro), I suffer from eating any animal proteins so eat Whole food plant based. Every so often I 'cheat' but suffer for days after. This last week I had fish chips and mushy peas whilst on holiday. Suffered for two days after with inflamed joints and LOTS of pain. Hey ho! lol
@@salan3 We don't appreciate how precious being able to eat (and taste) what we want to. My mother lost her sense of smell/taste completely and used her memory of how things tasted to make sense of the food. You really wanted the fish and chips and paid the price. I feel for you, keep safe.
@@salan3 i can understand the cheat day haha, just found out im lactose intolerant at 22😅 just came out of nowhere this year, dairy was once a daily thing and now i need to prepare ahead of time for a single cup of tea
What an awesome rediscovery! I hope to try this on an upcoming trip!
Reminds me of the "wonderbag", a south african invention for pretty much exactly what you tried to do in the video. Maybe closer to the hay box original though. I wonder what could be done using a pressure cooking pot (for super-heating) and such an insulating shell around it.
I was also thinking of wonderbag! Electricity free slow cooker
Thank you I came to look for the name of this and knew someone could remind me of the correct name ! Also if you buy one the donate one to a family who could benefit from one
I too thought of the Wonderbag, they sound like an excellent tool and company
I have an ecopot, same principle. But my Stanley did flasks make wonderful soup and creamed rice.
Omg yeah. Sorted food have done a whole video on that. With them trying out different combinations to cook with that
Traditionally, Icelandic rye bread was baked by putting the prepared loaf in a hole in geothermally heated soil and covering it. Plenty of hot ground in Iceland!
i forgot Iceland was a country and not just a supermarket for a second then.
My aunt used to do this with my uncles and cousins lunches during harvest. Soup/stew and sandwiches were pretty much the norm on a daily basis. Boil up a big pot of "stuff" and divide it amongst 3 thermos'. By the time lunch rolls around, everything is cooked and still hot. Learned so much about simplifying the process, and cooking in general, from her and my grandma. Thankfully I had better options than my mom to learn from (she overcooked everything). XD
Have you ever thought about a career reading audiobooks? Your voice is SO FREAKING RELAXING but still your rythm of speach makes everything super „colourful“. Sorry, I wouldn‘t even know how to describe it in my mother tongue.
And I love, how you seem to love that particular t-shirt. Xx
I made a "hay box" about 15 years ago, from a cardboard box and an old duvet for insulation. I could fit a very large pan (with two small side handles) in there. I was cooking for a family of five, and I often cooked more than was needed for one meal.
The insulation provided by the duvet was quite good but could have been better. After several hours, the food was generally just about cooked but was no longer hot enough to cook any further. I would usually put the pan back on the cooker for a few minutes to bring it to a boil. Food doesn't thicken much cooking this way, so I would sometimes add a slurry of cornflour and water to thicken it at the end. If the food looked a bit anaemic, I would sometimes add gravy granules instead, which would colour and thicken it at the same time.
I'm sure we saved a bit of money, but the main advantage was that I didn't need to keep returning to the pan to stir it and stop the contents from burning. I could go out for the day and spend a few minutes finishing off a nice hot meal when I got home, instead of having to prepare and cook the whole thing. Also, with this method, you don't get a room full of steam and loads of condensation on the windows in winter.
It's worth experimenting with this method. It's good in winter, when most of us tend to cook more soups and stews. It's also worth experimenting with different insulators. I just used what I had. It cost me nothing. I'm not sure it would be worth spending a lot of money on a box.
You can get 'thermal' ovens which are basically a big flasks, with specific pots that are designed to fit inside them so as well as the heat of the food you get the heat stored in the pot. They are really effective!
Could you provide a link? My googleing shows me only real ovens..
@@AmbrosiusVanDerCastel There's one called a Dreampot - I don't know if they're still available new. But I have one and it's brilliant. If you search for Thermal Cooker you will find some others like the Billyboil and the Ecopot which seem to do the same thing.
wonderbag
Shuttle chef thermos cookers are also brilliant. Google and TH-cam to find information. When camping I’d cook Thai green chicken curry in the large pot and rice or quinoa in the smaller pot. Both pots containing the boiled food were then placed in the outer thermos casing and then into a padded bag. We’d drive all day with the thermo cooker and arrive at camp about 5 pm and have a delicious hot meal ready and waiting for us. 🇦🇺🦘🦘🇦🇺
One thought would be to preheat the flask with boiling water before adding the hot ingredients. That way the food would not loose heat to the body of the flask.
This was very interesting semantically, and practically - thanks. I think I would have added the lentils and cracked wheat to the heating pan at the end to raise them to a higher temperature. Some of the hot stew could be used to heat the flask before returning it very briefly to the pan.
Energy saving anecdote - There's a YT canal boat channel where the couple live on one boat and run a coffee and cake cafe business from another. They bake their own cakes. They found that a full sized cake takes about 90 minutes to fully cook in their oven (possible electric), but if they divide the same quantity of cake mixture across a 12 compartment tray, baking is reduced to only 30 minutes. That's a significant difference. The size of the food to be cooked makes a big difference to the energy needed. There's also the issue of texture - peas cook quicker than potatoes, for example and being a vegan should require less cooking energy than than being a carnivore. I'll shut up now ...
Haybox cooking is the best way to make traditional Danish rice pudding. 3dl water and 3dl pudding rice in a pot, bring to a boil and keep boiling for 2 minutes while stirring, add 1 liter of whole milk and a quarter teaspoon of salt, bring back to boiling while stirring, when it boils, put lid on and put in haybox, leave for 60-90 minutes depending on how runny or firm you want the final dish.
Serve with cinnamon sugar and butter, for drink have a mørk hvidtøl (a sweet liquorish-like Danish small beer)
This reminded me of some high school shenanigans. In Taiwan, we are required to do a "late night study session" where we went to school at 7:30AM to 5:00 PM, but we'd have to stay for late night study till 9:00PM to prepare for the big college exam (it's insane). But I remember how on one day earlier in the day we had a cooking class where we learned how to make spaghetti. And so when late night study time comes around, a kid got hungry and had the brilliant idea to make spaghetti in his thermos bottle using the extra ingredients from the class earlier. He filled it up with hot water and started soaking the pasta in it, while he prepped other stuff secretly in his drawer. He was even really fancy with it, slicing up garlic with a box cutter and adding it along to the thermos with jarred sauce. Though in the end, he added way too much salt and couldn't eat it at all. It was really fucking funny to watch and made the session more bearable, though!
george a 13 hour long school day is absurd
lol all that school is absolutely useless, wasting your brain with paperwork when you could be learning a real skill.
@@寝子猫-j4y It is! Unfortunately that is the norm in Taiwan 😔
Jesus fucking christ when people say "nine to five" they don't mean it's the time you have *outside* of school/work.
Here in Hong Kong our culture puts a lot of weight on academics but even here that would be considered completely insane outside of cramming like the week before exams.
Very interesting topic - one benefit of the hay box approach is the added thermal mass of the cooking pot going into the box along with the food which isn’t available with the vacuum flask.
Btw- does anyone else remember seeing actor Vincent Price cooking salmon on the engine block of his car ?
Rings a bell along with him baking potatoes in the embers in Witchfinder General
My ex used to heat his canned soup on the engine block of a generator when it was hot during a long run.
@@happygardener28 yeah it was common practice at one time, especially fish,which didn't need a lot of cooking time
Dishwasher Trout recipe by Vincent Price.
th-cam.com/video/xtxOdDsWwS8/w-d-xo.html
Not sure about Vincent cooking on an engine, however Gordon Ramsay did it here
th-cam.com/video/o9vhGiSL904/w-d-xo.html
cook on mate.
I remember someone on tv cooking fish on the engine and concluding it tasted of engine fumes no matter how he sealed the package 😀
Digging a hole works too, there's some places that legit cook in the ground haha, this is a brilliant idea.
I used to fix breakfast this way for the days I worked. I would place rolled oats or other rolled grains, almond butter, brown sugar and cinnamon with boiling water in a wide mouth thermos the night before. Once filled, I would gently shake the thermos and lay it on its side overnight. It was always ready to eat the next morning after a little stir. In winter I would preheat the thermos with hot tap water for 15 minutes so the hot cereal was more creamy than toothy.
I like this
I've got a thermos flask, but I just use it to bring soup to work (I got used to having soup every lunch over the pandemic, and I'm not giving that up). One tip that was included with the thermos was to first put warm water into it to warm the thermos before putting warm food in. I guess this means the flask itself won't absorb as much warmth from the food because it's already absorbed heat from the water. I haven't tested the difference with and without the water, though.
Same principle as warming the teapot (or your mug) before you make tea. It would take a little more energy to heat the extra water but the cooking temperature for the food would be higher.
I always do that with coffee in the thermos and then in my mug it stays hot for ages
It also prevents glass lined thermos from cracking or shattering.
It really does make a difference, you don't even need to fill it to the top, just maybe 1/3, then swish it around a bit, pop the lid on, till you're ready to fill the flask. Then pour out the water.
With the second and third experiments, I’m hearing Ruth Goodman from Wartime Farm saying “and it does need to be rapidly boiling” about the meal she was about to cook in a hay box. Pouring boiling water over cold ingredients would immediately reduce the temperature to perhaps a simmering temp, rather than a rapid boil, so you’re not getting that initial temp high enough. I bet if you boiled the milk on the stove with the rice in it, the rice pudding would have worked. And of course if you had a lid on your little pot it would boil faster and maybe only take 6 minutes of gas rather than 8.
I’ve been planning to try a hay box after I move. The pic you showed is super cute! I can totally picture that sitting on my future porch! I hadn’t thought about using feathers in it though. Great idea! I have 6 chickens moulting right now. That’s not enough to fill a box, but after I move I’ll probably have 20-30 or so chickens, and of course I’ll need to pluck the odd cockerel. That’s a great extra use for the feathers before they go to the compost.
I have one of those Mr. D's thermal cookers. Great piece of kit, use it all the time. The pan has a cast iron ring underneath so the food cooks even better inside the thermal cover. I particularly like how easy and quick it is too use. Throw some stuff in the pan, heat it up thoroughly, put pan inside the cover and close the lid. Go live life and enjoy a tasty hot dinner. I will definitely always have a thermal cooker in the house from now on out.
The book you may be talking about was 'The Survivor' by Kurt Saxon. One thing you may consider is turning the flask on its side. That may make it loose heat more but it would also distribute it more evenly along with the contents within. You could also consider pouring out the contents and reheating them if you know they would take long to cook. In the end it would still be less fuel used.
Some things cook better than others. Porridge would be a good one to try.
@@anthonyjacobs6790 Yes, I know in the old days, some people would start their porridge at bedtime, and the pot would sit on the back of the wood stove all night, and then in the morning, when you rekindled the fire, your porridge was done to creaminess.
I’ve done this many times using a Stanley stainless thermos food jar and it typically works very well. Two tips: preheat the jar/flask with boiling water a few minutes before dumping it out to pour the food in. Then, after sealing it, turn it on its side before wrapping it in a towel or bubble wrap, etc, since heat travels up. It works quite well with most grains or small legumes. It does not work with chana dal (at least the kind we get in the US) as they are apparently “super-dried” to prevent insects from being imported with them. Another great Shrimp video!
Just a thought along with the camping idea , wrap the thermos up in a sleeping bag & it will retain the heat extremely well , I use this to keep beer cool when camping and even on really hot days it works great.
It works. We cooked some of our meals that way when hiking a few years back. We used hot water bought from the DNT huts to save our fuel (and carry a little less weight, tent+stuff was already enough). Soups work very well and are great after a long hike.
I love this channel because of all its content and of course Mr. Shrimp. He’s just so damn knowledgeable and interesting. But reading through the comments is priceless. What a great sense of humour you all have. 👍
I read a couple of local recipe books from the depression era, and the haybox cooking method was recommended constantly, because there simply wasn't enough firewood to heat things up the conventional way. It blew my mind, because I had never heard or thought about such a method. What also blew my mind was the fact that there wasn't even enough firewood to go around in times of war.
One of the recipe books I read was from the World War I era, and they went through some recipes using quite unconventional ingredients. The book was printed during an emergency period, in a time when there was a huge shortage of everything -- even basic foodstuffs. There were recipes using lichen and bark, and even non-food recipes were included. One inedible recipe that stuck to my mind was for boiling pigs feet, NOT for eating, but for separating the fat out of them to be used as a lubricating oil for machinery.
The books I read only focused on surviving with what we have locally here in Finland, and as such, they were only printed in Finnish. I'm sure such literature exists in every language and I warmly recommend everyone to read them. The recipes from back then would still be useful today in times of famine and crisis, and learning about those times can be very eye-opening.
the "Høkasse" method is still relatively popular today for preparing Danish christmas rice pudding, often a big wooden chest stuffed with duvets, blankets, and various other linens.
Usually an extreme amount of rice pudding is made the evening before for dinner/dessert, and the morning/noon after, the remains are heated up, and then transferred to the chest/box.
by evening, its relatively cool, gets mixed with vanilla, whipped cream, optionally chopped almonds, and is served for christmas eve dessert.
I've been interested in old (and wartime) cookbooks for a long time, so the hay-box is a familiar concept to me. My aunt (born in 1931, so she knew scarcity in and after the war) used to put things in her bed, wrapping the lidded pot up in her blankets, to let it finish stewing. I never imagined using a thermos for it, but with the current energy prices, I'm going to build a hay-box anyway.
PS: From what I know of hay-box-cooking, it's not enough to reach cooking temperature. The instructions say to maintain a good boil for a few minutes before putting the food in hay in the original cooking container.
One vlogger made a pot "cozy" using the reflective heating duct insulation. Another made hers out of fabric and quilt batting.
TIL apparently a watched pot actually takes eight minutes to boil 😉
Seriously, this was a fun experiment. Reminds me of an old camping trick of placing a Dutch oven in a dirt hole and then surrounding it with fire heated stones.
Thanks for sharing it.
I'd like to see you try homemade solar oven cooking and the foil packet car engine style of cooking. Both interesting methods of saving money. There's also rocket stove outdoor cooking which uses much smaller amounts of wood than an open wood fire.
Proper compost pile can best up above 65 celsius
Heat
My American ex mother in law used to make what is known as Hobo Dinners - foil packed & placed in the car engine. By the time you arrived at a far distant place (for them it was a tail gate parking lot party before the 'football' game about 2 to 3 hours drive time the Hobo Dinner was ready. A shorter journey's Hobo Dinner would be to have fish instead of diced meat as it cooked faster!
This is a very interesting concept. In the US, there are BBQ competitors that use a form of insulated cooking to tenderize their final dishes. They use a small insulated box (about the size of a desktop mini-fridge) paired with boiling water in a pan at the bottom. Their meats (ribs, loins, etc) are brought to the ideal internal temperature, and placed inside the container which keeps everything hot for several hours. This is enough to "slow cook" the meats until they are tender instead of using fuel.
Excellent idea, I can see many uses for this, I was thinking of putting oats, hot milk, dried fruit, nuts and a pinch of salt in a flask the night before for my breakfast...
I dehydrate a lot of fruit and veg, i wonder if a variety of dry items, a stock cube, boiling water would make a good soup. Anyway, excellent video as usual sir
Be sure to boil the milk, or it might go off in this warm enviroment. You don´ t want to keep it warm to long, the food is done much faster than you think. You dont want to keep your food warm for to long, it spoils both flavour and vitamins. (Nobody would leave a pot of soup on the oven all night, not even at low temperature. ) I had a big pot of stew go from delicous to bad over night, becauce it was kept too warm.
For oats, you don't even need to heat up the ingredients for them to cook. I make overnight oats for my breakfast every day, and I just put some oats, milk, apple sauce, dried fruit, and nuts in a container and stick it in the fridge, and by the morning it's ready to eat. Stays good for up to 4 days, so I make 4 at a time. If I feel like eating it hot, I stick it in the microwave for a minute, but it's also perfectly good eaten cold.
Dude I love this channel it's got a little bit of everything.
I was disappointed with my Thermos. I was told it would keep hot things hot and cold things cold.
Once lunchtime came around my soup was lukewarm and my ice cream had melted into it. Wouldn't recommend.
So it's not just my thermos having that issue
Perhaps you should reflash the AI. It is supposed to automatically detect if it should keep hot food hot or cold food cold. But I suppose it may sometimes get it wrong. Tech these days...
@@adoby83 Maybe we should go back to using separate pots instead of these scammy flasks
@@abigailcarter775 I was making a bad joke about how putting soup and ice cream in the same flask doesn't keep them at their respective temperatures 😉
What you need is a Maxwell's Demon. I pop one in my Thermos and it keeps the top hot and the bottom cold.
I own and use on a regular basis a 100 year old "Fireless Cooker". It has lava like insulation inside and steel inside walls. You heat up one or two soapstones (depending if you are stewing or baking). Heat up the food and put it in a locked aluminum vessel with lid. One soapstone goes on the bottom. The vessel with food on top of that and if the vessel has a pie in it where you need to bake it, a second soapstone on top. OR you can add additional vessels with locked lids. These were popular before electricity in the country so a woman could help on the farm. She could get lunch and dinner going before dawn, spend the day in the fields and have farmhouse meals for family and hands.
1) A friend, a keen swimmer, would put oats and hot milk in a flask at 6AM before going training. When he finished training at 8AM the flask contained porridge. He did this for years.
2) I had an "original" slow cooker, by Tower, from the 1970s. It ran MUCH cooler than a modern slow cooker, with much longer recommended cooking times. The instructions mention that meat will cook fine like this, but some root vegetables actually required pre-cooking. This may speak to your soup/stew results.
A copy of the original Tower recipe book (by Annette Yates) might be applicable to your experiments.
I remember we had a Tower slow cooker in the 1970s. After 9 hours potatoes were still hard. As I remember, they had to recall a whole batch for being underpowered. The replacement certainly worked better
Nice video, and very relevant right now on Poverty Island (UK). I look forwards to the rest of the series mate 👍
There is a modern haybox, a wonder bag, which looks excellent. I like their focus on reducing deforestation. The TH-cam Channel Sorted covered this well and made a rice pudding in one!
I wonder if a flask to cook might work well for rice porridge (congee), a common food in many Asian countries. Left over cooked rice in a flask with boiling water overnight and you might have the right consistency. Not quite rice pudding but you can make a sweet version or a savoury version. The original famine food, you can feed a lot more people with rice porridge than with steamed rice
I have a wonderbag. It’s ace!
I started doing it when I was a lab technician in 1973 particularly to deal with brown rice (easy) as part of a veg soup. Later the motorcycle journey to work was long enough to cook my soups.
We usually 'cook' Rice Pudding in bed sheet. Put Everything in a pot until it starts to boil and then wrap up in thick bed sheets for 1-2hrs
Sounds like the way native Americans would cook.
This was so interesting. It's something I would have tried for myself, but not with my narrow necked vacuum flask because cleaning would be a pain. I really appreciate Shrimp experiment videos for addressing the practical side of survival cooking without going off the deep-end.
Just wanted to add: The skin on a freshly cooked rice pudding is by far the best bit.
Wow. I may actually try this. No confusing recipe ideas or 'cooking wisdom'. Straight to the point.
I like that you don't discard food that looks non-ideal like those mid ribs of cabbage.
Yes ~ He Is Always Very Mindful About Not Wasting Food And Tries
To Get The Best Out Of Everything
Thanks for sharing! I had great success with rice, noodles and lentils. Also with some kind of dehydrated food that only needs to be prepared in boiling water. What you might want to try to improve your results is to preheat your flask. Just put in a bit of boiling water before you fill in the ingredients. Of course, empty the bottle before doing so. Good luck!
The "hay box" may work better than the thermos as the pan is holding a large thermal potential that is going in the washing up bowl. Some years ago polystyrene milk bottle insulators were available to keep doorstep deliveries cool, a version of this for the pan may be better, cheers.
I used a polystyrene lined box with a glass jar inside to make yogurt. Just heat the milk to 90 Celcius, put it in the jar, let it cool to 35 Celcius and add the starter yogurt to the milk and put the jar in the insulating box.
Around eight hours later the yogurt is ready. You can make a more creamy yogurt by adding milk powder to the milk.
@@peterjf7723 one of the milk bottle "coolers" would have been ideal for that.
I've recently been given an "Ecopot" which is basically a modern haybox. It does work for lots of things but I would say that precooking is necessary for some items rather than just preheating.
Pulses that had already been soaked overnight I thought would be perfect but sadly after 6 hours were still crunchy
Came here to see a funny experiment and I'm walking away with so much new found cooking knowledge. Thank you so much 👍🏾
other ways to conserve heat would be heating a really big pot. the square cube law makes big things harder to cool down just be virtue of mass and surface area. my grandmother used to boil beans in jars that way she had a electric 50L self-heating pot that she wrapped in blankets after heating up and then just left it for half a day or so.
the jars had glass lids a rubber ring acting as seal. wenn the hot jars cooled down they sealed themselves by under pressureing. cooking and preserving in one and I assume it takes less energy than doing it individualy
edit: i guess you could make the jars hexagonal (bestagonal) to fit perfectly :D
edit2: cooking is denaturation when it come to proteins at least. you can achieve that by other means like acid (carpaccio thats called i believe) or radiation (leave it in the sun or a nuclear reactor :D)
I've cooked hemp seed and other dried grains for fishing in flasks fairly regularly over the years. The usual process is to soak for 24hrs and then boil for half an hour or so (with the addition of a little bicarbonate of soda to blacken the seed) until the seeds crack open to reveal the white inside (relatively efficient for large batches of a few kg at a time but does stink the kitchen out). If, however, you don't have time or you've simply forgotten and you only need a pint or so you can just put some dry seed in a flask (leaving room for expansion) and fill with boiling water from a kettle and leave overnight, in the morning you've got prepared hemp ready for draining and decanting into a bait box (save the water for mixing with groundbait).
I think the most convenient and effective way of saving energy while cooking is to keep the lid on the pan as much as possible.
Secondly I'd say to try and boil as little water as possible, heating water to the boiling point takes a lot less energy that actually turning it in to steam does.
I've used a modern version of a haybox assembled from a large laundry basket filled with crumpled newspaper, as it worked better as filling than either blankets or pillows. It also shapes itself well to the shape of the pot, so there aren't any large air spaces around it. It worked well for making good-sized, say two to four quart, closed pots of lentils and soups so long as everything was brought to a boil for a minute or two before being bedded down in the paper, even if the paper was not particularly warm beforehand. Pouring boiling water over raw solids to cover just didn't quite do the job, as the solid bits wouldn't get hot enough long enough for the necessary chemical changes in the food. Given that in the boiling water method that you're having to bring the water to a boil anyway, having the solids heating up in the water as well shouldn't reduce efficiency much, if at all, and it gets the cooking started around 70C or so as the solution continues to heat up.
Your starting out with small pieces of food also helps the process, as does soaking legumes beforehand. Split peas or French lentils might not need it, but you want to take advantage of as many ways to speed cooking as possible. Do avoid using large chunks of raw food, as they will not heat through in the time it takes to bring the broth and other ingredients to a boil.
As to the question of saving money/energy, it does matter over time. A pot of lentils and veggies cooked up in ten or twelve minutes and packed away to finish cooking on its own vs that same ten or twelve minutes plus sustaining even a low input over another two to four hours adds up over the course of a week or a month.
Me too. I use a load of coats wrapped around a large pot of water at 45 degrees to incubate yogurt. When the temperature differential to the room is quite low like that, a simple arrangement like this can keep the water (and prospective yogurt) at a remarkably stable temperature for 8-12 hours quite easily, since the rate of cooling is proportional to the temperature differential.
I was wondering how I could utilise this for myself because I don't have a flask like that I have an aluminium flask for drinks but then it hit me. Mashed potatoes. The energy that goes into boiling mash is incredibly high so what if they got "cooked" in the flask over a few hours? I'll let you know later today.
if you do a little internet surfing you can find alternatives from cloth bags filled with wool or cotton batting to heating duct insulation. Just make sure your pot has a tight fitting lid.
Well the energy that goes into boiling water is incredibly high. Not into boiling potatoes. Just chop then up smaller to reduce cooking time though. Microwave is generally more efficient as well.
the new thermal cookers like the ecopot work pretty well, they are popular with the narrowboaters and motorhome/van people as it uses less fuel but also produces less steam, reducing condensate problems.
This makes me wonder how energy efficient my electric pressure cooker is. There are a few things I cook in it by getting it up to pressure and then just shutting it off to steam until the pressure releases naturally.
pressure cookers are very efficient compared to stove top, especially if it uses induction to heat the internal pot.
I remove the heat source when cooking dried pasta. If you bring the salted water to the boil, add the pasta, stir, cover, and turn off the heat, the pasta will cook in the heated water in about the same amount of time as if the water was kept on the boil. Much more economical. Learned this from a cook in an Aged Care Facility. Clearly he had to cook vast quantities of pasta at any one time, and this was the best way to do it. // Also, when I was a child, we used to visit my maternal grandmother every other Sunday for lunch. My Mum would partially cook a leg of lamb, roast beef, or whatever. She had it down to a fine art. Then she would put it in a container, wrap the whole thing in a number of towels, and sit it in the boot of the car for the journey. By the time we got there (about 45 mins) the meat would have finished cooking in it's own heat, and my grandmother would have the vegetables almost ready to eat. Gravy would be made from the juices of the meat from the container it was in. We would be sitting down to a hot and perfectly cooked roast lunch within 15-20 mins of arriving.
I recently started cooking with my microwave instead of my oven. i heard that its more more energy efficient but i never made sure.
Of course youre losing maillard reactions when cooking in the microwave but at least its quick and easy.
In this case the recipe is as follows:
500g unfrozen vegetables, heavily salted, maybe more spices
~250g of grated cheese mixed with ~75g of cream cheese on top
10 Minuten on high setting in the microwave, unfrozen might even require less time than hat, i'm still figuring out whats efficient and sufficient.
The microwave is definitely much more efficient than the oven - a microwave oven uses less power than a typical oven (around 1kW vs 2+kW) _and_ takes much less time. Sure, the oven doesn't use its full power constantly during cooking, but it does while it's warming up, and I can probably bake a potato in my microwave in less time than my oven takes to warm up!
You should try eggs in the microwave. You can add anything you'd put in an omelet and make it a meal. You have to cover them because they do pop, but you have eggs in less than a minute.
Very interesting video! It did make me think about one or two potential areas for improvement:
Water has a very large heat capacity (pretty sure everyone knows this already). Also, the vegetables/etc will also have a large heat capacity, since they are mostly water.
The 1st trial you did involved boiling everything together and then sealing it. The other trials you did involved having room temp food in the thermos and pouring boiling water into it. Of these, the 1st trial had the most heat & energy sealed away, because the vegetables were brought up to the same temperature as the water. With the other two, the food had to first find an equilibrium of temperature with the boiling water, so this will result in a lower starting temperature.
Also, using salt in the first trial increased the boiling point of the water before you added it to the flask. More energy was sealed into the thermos this way too.
I often cook eggs using this method. Put one egg in the flask, pour boiling water and leave for around 15 minutes. This will give you a hard boiled egg. I may preheat the flask in winter.
And no, radishes are not turnips. They are different species.
They are very closely related, of the same family (brassica) and have a similar flavour when cooked. Turnips are more robust, not as tasty raw.
I've done the same with eggs when camping. Then used the water for clean-up.
the rice pudding is often cooked with this method in norway! it's called "dynegrøt" from the covers (dyne) you wrap the heated pot in, before you put it in your bed and leave it for about 4 hours.
cooking in a "pot cozy" is commonly used by hikers trying to minimize the amount of fuel needed.
It's the same with boil in the bag meals, some people boil them for 10 minutes, it's better to bring them to the boil, then turn off heat leave for 5 mins then reboil and leave for another 6 or 7 mins, you'll use half the gas but get the same result.
Takes slightly longer but is far more economic.
Watched today, very interesting. I had read about it years ago as well. Great that you try things I would like to try.
usually when i use a thermos i preheat it first, maybe that would work better for the second recipe
You explain thermodynamics very well, and thanks for showing me the haybox, neat! Would love to see you explore energy saving even more!
It’s also worth noting that, while rinsing the lentils may seem pointless, soaking them does help them take less time to cook, same with oats and other grains.
Edit: including rice
Would you not have to soak rice in the fridge to avoid bacteria growth ?
And pasta, I’ve started soaking my pasta for twenty minutes before hand, as it takes less cooking x
@@rattlesnakz9716 No if you just soak 6 hours you'll be fine. Adding a bit of salt will further reduce growth. Don't drink the soaking water.
Maybe the boiling will kill the bacteria. You want to actually boil the rice for several minutes not just pour boil8ng water over it I would guess.
@@Stella2U unfortunately Bacillus cereus is not killed during cooking, not enough to stop prolific growth anyway
In Girlscouts, in my youth, one time at camp we made Hay Hole Ice Cream. It seems a similar concept to the Hay Box cooking method you mentioned. We dug a big hole and lined it with hay and put our cream & sugar mixture in a sealed container into the hole. Then we put more hay and some dirt over the container. For good measure, we covered the hay hole with a tarp. I suppose the tarp kept things tidy, but mainly it marked where we had dug our hay hole. The ice cream turned out lovely.
What about trying the boil in a pressure cooker, the temperature at the "flasking" stage will be higher so it should be hotter at the end of 5/6 hours maybe?
When you *release* the pressure to transfer the food to the flask, the liquid will be at the same 100c as a normal pan.
As soon as you depressurise a pressure cooker the temperature of the liquid will drop back to open pan boiling temperature. So you cannot add extra heat to the Thermos this way and you will have used extra energy raising the food up to its pressure boiling temperature, lost when you depressurise.
@@Gribbo9999 Yes that's true, of course you are right. Once the cooker reached pressure you could allow the pressure to release naturally though, then contents into the Thermos. That could be worth a test
@@st200ol what are you testing? The water will be at 100, same as a normal saucepan.
@@paulwomack5866 Yes when the stuff goes into the vacuum flask it will be, but at the point the cooker reaches pressure it will be at or near 121 degrees C. A slow release of pressure (heat off) may keep the stuff at above normal boiling point for longer necessitating a shorter cooking time in the flask and a hotter product at the end of the total cooking time. I have no idea if any of this will achieve anything but it seems on topic with the content of the video and worth a try perhaps?
Haybox cooking works really well! As I routinely cook Sunday roast but we are eating at my dad‘s place due to him not being mobile, when I want to bake a whole goose (5ish kg) that takes longer than we are at his place, I start baking it at home for 1,5-2h, wrap it up in silicone baking mats, blankets and put it in a washing basket. We move it to my dads place which takes 1- 1,5h (out of oven time) and put it back into the oven. This shortens the ‚adding heat‘ cooking time calculated by weight by half the time it was out of the oven and I feel even keeps the goose more moist.
I've been cooking at home for decades, but I only discovered in the past couple of years that when you cook a pan of boiled rice, you don't have to simmer away all of the water for 20 minutes - just do so for 10 minutes and then leave it off the heat with the pan lid on for a further 10 minutes, at which point it will have absorbed most of the water and be fully cooked.
I typically add the rice and boiling water, bring it back to the boil in the pan then turn it off and leave the lid on. The rice will cook without any additional heat. It takes a bit longer, maybe half an hour. I usually walk the dog while it's sitting and it's done when I get home. Sometimes I put a tea cosy over the pan and it keeps it all piping hot while I prepare everything else if I'm making a particularly long winded meal.
I normly Just use absorbtion method in microwave
@@unnamedchannel1237 Same thing - just the application of energy to heat it to a point, stop heating and then let residual heat finish the cooking.
@@Shakedown180 The "long winded" meals tend to be the best ones! With that said, clearly as a cook yourself, have you ever had that situation where you've spent such a long time running around preparing a really good meal that by the time you serve it up and sit down with everyone else to eat it, you no longer feel hungry?
@@terrydaktyllus1320 This happens far too often! If we have people over and I try to cook an extravagant meal i find I've got no appetite after trying to keep the kitchen running smoothly while entertaining!
I recently did an article on this, over a decade after I bought an "As seen on TV Pasta" variant and came up with this very idea. 1st let me say, you are going to get people sick if they follow this without some major modifications for Slow Cooking.
As someone mentioned, 1st mistake is not pre warming your thermos. Next mistake was using a cheap thermos to begin with. The problem with your particular thermos is that the heat dissipates for too fast. In my research, and what I currently use, Stanley 1913 brand is the only Thermos that I would trust for this method of cooking. I have had a cup of warm coffee 24 hours after I originally filed my Stanley 1913 food storage thermos. Of the other 10 or so food container thermos brands i have tried, all lost their heat many, many hours compared to Stanley 1913. I own 4 of their thermos containers.
Both my ex of 28 years and my stepmother were nutritionists, and I am an avid self proclaimed chef, and the major issue you have here is that you are too close to the food danger zone temperature, and for pork, it needs to be 145°F, of which your food was 143°F, & was that temperature for almost 1 hour prior to opening. If that was chicken, you would be sending people to the hospital. This would best work with pork or beef.
My suggestion is to buy a Stanley 1913 24+ oz food container, preheat it with boiling water and close it up, when your food your cooking hits boiling temperature, pour out the boiling water from thermos, and IMMEDIATELY pour in the food and close it tight. You do not have time to add anything else during this step. You will not need to add additional insulation with it, as this is the best thermos brand on the market. Remember never ever use this Slow Cook method for seafood or for chicken, the risk of death/illness is just too great.
I always preheat the inside of my flask with boiling water before I put my coffee in. It keeps the coffee much hotter for much longer that way. I bet it would help the cooking too.
That's kind of how you're supposed to use flasks actually, most instructions tell you to "preheat" them.
Excellent video! I just realized there are actual thermos pots designed exactly for that purpose!
I just searched google for insulated slow cookers and found all sorts of pots
I would have preheated the flask by filling it with boiling water, then emptying it before putting the soup in.
My family has used this method for cooking rice since the seventies. My mom woul bring the rice pot to boil, then "put it to bed". In Germany we have duvets, so she would stick it under the covers to keep it warm. I found the bed part a bit complicated, so I cover the rice pot with a thick towel. Works a treat!!! But don t waste time waiting around 6 hours, at least the rice is done in 30 minutes.
I tried this method for cooking stews in a pressure cooker, and it reduces not only cooking time, but also the energy bill.
For even more efficiency, food safety (meats) and better flavor (onions and cabbage), fry or saute the ingredients in fat shortly, bevor adding your water or stock, and any pulses. The finer you are chopping, the less it needs cooking. You can shorten the cooking time of beans, chick peas and lentils by soaking them overnight before you cook them. (not necessary for dhal) Oh, and the ammount of residue heat changes according to you portions. Large portions retain a lot of residue heat, small portions are less optimal. Cooking for several people conserves energy.
I think you’re talking about “The Poor Man’s James Bond”?
I could see this working well as a kind of hybrid cooking techniques that would remove the need for something like a slow cooker that's just ticking away all day.
Prepare the food as you did I'm the beginning, then when you reach whatever time, throw the contents back in a pan and reheat back up to serving temperature.
With a big enough insulated vessel, you could even go back every hour or 2, reheat it back to boiling and back in again.
In theory cheaper than a slow cooker ticking away all day losing heat through the lid etc.
Can't go wrong with the skin on a rice pudding. We used to fight over it every Sunday as kids 😋
Especially the crust around the inside of the dish
Oh yes, grab that spoon and scrape it clean yummy.
Vietnamese Pho uses this principle to some extent. One of the ingredients of the dish are raw strips of thin meat which are cooked by the latent heat of the hot broth that's poured on top of the other ingredients when the dish is assembled.
If you want to reduce the cooking time of certain ingredients, like the wheat or things like that, maybe it's worth to leave them soaking before hand for a few hours. That should reduce the cooking time quite a bit.
I cooked chickpeas in the SHO 800ml thermos flask & loved it. I preheated it with hot tap water & boiled ½ C of unsoaked chickpeas for 5 minutes in a Dash Express Hot Pot. Dash mini appliances are another great way to minimize electric costs & are fun. After 10 hours in the flask, the temperature was 143F/62C.They were fully cooked; but firm with a bit of texture.
I would just make more food that you only need the oven for, as it uses less energy than the stove.
Well, my one does anyway.
Just eat one big meal a day
During the war we used hay boxes to do the same thing. They cooked stuff wonderfully well. You might like to try creating one they are very easy to make. A wooden box and hay for insulation with news paper in between. We had to be inventive when resources were in short supply. It would cook a soup stew rice pudding or anything that needs long slow cooking
Some wires crossed in my brain when I saw this video, thought it was about cooking shrimp in a flask. For half the video I was wondering where the seafood came into the picture.
Just watched your vid on tv and thought i would comment, for some years now we have heated water on our wood stove and filled flasks with boiling water, next morning fill a cup with the water and tickle through in the electric kettle, its not cooking but it saves a little on the bills, cheers Dave
One of my favorite old cookbooks describes these as “flameless cooking” and I always found that name charming.
For any future experiments, I can tell you that quinoa can be cooked in a thermos flask. I used to fairly regularly put quinoa and a few spices in my food flask (it was a small, one-meal one) and top it off with boiling water in the morning. I'd shake it a couple of times throughout the morning and by lunchtime it was nicely cooked and still hot. I don't think I ever tried anything more complicated but this video definitely makes me want to revisit the idea.
As a west coast American with messed up sleep, I love the midnight uploads
Atomic Shrimp is also a superb cultural ambassador for Britain - but I wouldn't be able to get to sleep while watching his videos.
I recommend tuning in to the BBC World Service radio to help you sleep.
That pot in hay reminds me of the time my mom cooked milk rice (sweet dish but we ate it as a lunch main with e.g. hot cherries and/or vanilla sauce).
After the milk with rice boiled up, the whole pot was transferred into my parent's bed (conveniently located on the ground floor) and tucked in under the blankets and day blanket (like a very thin, decorative duvet?). There the rice was allowed to soak, swell, amd soften for the hours it took for us coming back from school.
I played about a few years ago with 'freezer bag cooking'. Basically the same thing here, but pouring boiling water into a premix in a bag. Then loading it into an insulated pouch.
Had some success, more failures. Rice was one of the failures.
Great vid, thanks! Rice is tricky. May I suggest this, a common shortcut for making Cantonese-style congee (rice porridge) in 20 min as opposed to 2-3 hrs. The night before, pour twice-rinsed rice (60g / pers, you still want some starch on it) into a freezer bag w. a little oil and salt. Freeze overnight. The next day, the classical method says to bring stock or water to a boil, add frozen rice, simmer 10 mn and then add aromatics and possibly bits of fish, or a thousand-year egg (alkaline I think, helps breaking up the rice), and wait until it boils again, at which point it is cooked. I'm wondering whether congee would cook if you defrosted the rice at room temp, poured everything in at the first boiling point (like your soup) and transferred to the flask. Anyhow, looking forward to the sequel(s).
There are multiple ways to reduce the fuel consumption. For gas burners, you can use a pot skirt to keep the fire and it's heat going alongside the pot instead of going to the sides. Once you cooked it, you can use fireless cookers or thermal cooker similarly to how you use a thermos. Bonus points for using a solar cooker, ideally a home-made one which you to make using either printer paper or a cheap tarp, epoxy resin for binding, and food-grade aluminium foil, to make sheets which to concentrate sunlight, ideally with a few pinholes through which a drop of epoxy to ooze out or be applied, to hook the tinfoil from both sides. A thermal cooker is a thermos the size of a pot, inside which you can place a pot to keep it hot for longer. The lower-tech version would be to use pillows and blankets and quilts or whatever else you have available, to keep the pot hot for longer, just not as long as with a thermal cooker (pot-sized thermos). All in all, I very much like the idea of cooking in a thermos. Might even be worth buying a few more thermoses to cook a bigger meal inside it, and use something like heated metals to effectively bake things inside the thermos, especially with aid from some wire and small/tiny metal plates which to keep in place like on a grill, or using the thermos sideways with metal sheets used as trays or baking trays modified for cooking in a thermos. I recommend the LowTechMagazine website, the article called "If We Insulate Our Houses, Why Not Our Cooking Pots?", for more info, and relevant images. Indoor solar cooking is also interesting, regardless of whether the greenhouse-like thing is in the house or outside, the solar concentrator looking like a satellite dish with a mirror finish.
This is an excellent video, Im glad to see someone covering this!