- 5 hours ago
A pantry full of food won’t help much in a power outage if you have no safe way to cook it. In this practical emergency-preparedness guide, Elias explains why “food that needs no cooking” can send people home with meals that still need heating—and shares ways to cook when the power is out.
Learn how to test whether a gas burner can light with a match, use an outdoor grill or camp stove, and cook with a fireless cooker (hay box) to save fuel. The guide also covers using a heavy pot and lid, managing fridge and freezer food, and essential carbon monoxide safety, including why charcoal must never be burned indoors. A useful resource for power outage cooking, storm readiness, off-grid living, and building a realistic emergency food plan.
Learn how to test whether a gas burner can light with a match, use an outdoor grill or camp stove, and cook with a fireless cooker (hay box) to save fuel. The guide also covers using a heavy pot and lid, managing fridge and freezer food, and essential carbon monoxide safety, including why charcoal must never be burned indoors. A useful resource for power outage cooking, storm readiness, off-grid living, and building a realistic emergency food plan.
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:00Last week, the shops emptied out. Across the water, the government put out a list and told people to be
00:06ready to look after themselves for three days, and within about a day, the tinned food was gone.
00:13One chain said tinned sales jumped 40 percent. A shop selling torches said they sold near four times as many
00:22in three days, and radios about double. Water and beans and soup went off the shelves entirely.
00:30And I have no quarrel with any of that. Three days is a small, sensible thing to ask, and most
00:37of you are closer to it than you think.
00:39But there was one line on that list, and it is the line that sent people home with the wrong
00:46bags.
00:47Food that needs no cooking. I want you to think about what that sentence does to a person standing in
00:54an aisle in a hurry.
00:56It sends them to the tinned soup. And tinned soup is food that very much needs cooking, or at least
01:04needs heating.
01:05And cold out of a tin on the fourth day of a cold house, it is a miserable thing that
01:11nobody will eat.
01:13People did not buy food that needs no cooking. They bought food they have no way to cook.
01:20I am Elias Yoder, and I have never had the power on in this house. Not once, not ever.
01:28Every meal my family has eaten was cooked without a wire coming in from the road.
01:34And I am going to spend today on the half of this that nobody put on the list.
01:40My grandmother ran a kitchen through a winter when the wood ran short, and she is the one who taught
01:46me how to think about this.
01:48She used to say, the food was never the hard part. Anybody can find something to eat.
01:55The fire was the hard part. The question was never what you have to eat. It was what you have
02:02to cook it with.
02:04I gathered the whole of it into a book at EliasYoder.com. The book is the long version. If you
02:11want it, it is there. I will not mention it again.
02:15And I want to take some fear out of this before we start, because there is a great deal of
02:20frightened talk about at the minute, and very little of it is useful.
02:25Nobody is telling you the world is ending. Three days is a storm. Three days is a line down and
02:33a crew working through the night to put it back.
02:36It happens in this county most winters, and it is not an emergency here, because a house that never had
02:44the switch does not notice when the switch stops working.
02:48What I am going to give you is what we actually do, and then the version of it for a
02:55house that has a stove, a kettle, and a cooker that stopped working an hour ago.
03:01Four rules come before any of it, and the first one is the one that kills people every single storm.
03:09Never burn charcoal inside. Not in the house, not in the garage with the door up, not on a porch
03:17with a roof over it.
03:19Charcoal throws off an enormous quantity of carbon monoxide, and carbon monoxide has no smell and no color and no
03:29taste, and it does not make you cough or choke.
03:33It makes you sleepy. People lie down and do not get up, and it happens after every big storm, and
03:42it is always somebody who was only trying to make their family a hot meal.
03:48Second, a generator goes outside and well away from the building, with the exhaust pointed away from it, never in
03:57a garage or a basement or under a window. Same reason.
04:02Third, do not try to heat a room with something built to cook. A gas oven left open with the
04:10door down is not a heater, and it is a well-known way to put a family to sleep.
04:16And fourth, if you own a carbon monoxide alarm, go and check the battery in it tonight rather than on
04:24the night you need it. If you do not own one, that is the cheapest thing on any preparation list
04:31anybody has published this month, and nobody panic bought a single one.
04:37And learn what it feels like, because it does not announce itself. A headache that will not shift. Feeling dizzy
04:47or sick or oddly stupid, unable to follow a simple thing. Most of all, wanting to sleep.
04:55People put all of that down to a bad day and a cold house. Here is the test that costs
05:02nothing.
05:03If more than one person under that roof feels it at the same time, or if you feel better the
05:08moment you step outside, and worse again when you come back in, get everybody out of the building and call
05:15for help from outside it.
05:17Do not go back in to open windows. Do not go back in for anything. Now.
05:25Ten ways to put heat under a pot.
05:29One. Your gas stove will probably still light, and almost nobody knows this. If you cook on gas, the burners
05:37on top are opened by the knob, mechanically.
05:40What the electricity does is make the spark. So when the power goes, the spark goes, and the gas does
05:47not. Strike a match first, hold it beside the burner, and then turn the knob.
05:52That order, every time. If it does not catch in a few seconds, turn it off, and let the air
05:59clear before you try again.
06:01Now the part people get wrong. Your oven will almost certainly not work, because a modern gas oven uses an
06:10electric element to open its safety valve, and with no power, that valve stays shut.
06:16So the top works, and the oven does not. Go and try your own burners tonight, while it is light
06:22and calm and nothing is wrong, so that you already know the answer.
06:27And so that nobody is left guessing, here is where everybody else stands.
06:32If your range is a glass top, or coils, or induction, it is dead the moment the power is, and
06:40there is nothing to be done about it.
06:42If you have what they call dual fuel, gas on top and electric in the oven, the top will light,
06:49and the oven will not.
06:50And if your cooktop is one of the newer ones, where even the burners are opened by a touch panel,
06:57rather than a knob you turn, that will not light either.
07:00The knob is the thing to look for. A knob you physically turn is a mechanical valve, and a mechanical
07:08valve does not care about the power company.
07:122. The grill in your garden. I am always surprised how many people stand in a dark kitchen, wondering what
07:20to do with a perfectly good cooker sitting 20 feet away under a cover.
07:25Gas or charcoal, it does not matter. It is a stove. Take the pot out to it. The only rule
07:33is the first rule, which is that it stays outside.
07:373. A single-burner camp stove. $20 or $30, runs on a small canister, boils a kettle in minutes, and
07:47it will live in a cupboard for 10 years without asking anything of you.
07:51Use it outdoors or in a doorway with real air moving, unless the maker states plainly that the thing is
07:59made for indoor use, and even then I would want an alarm on the wall.
08:054. A fire outside with something across it. This is the oldest answer there is. Three blocks and a grate
08:13from an old barbecue, or a grill rack laid over stones. Build it small. A big fire is for looking
08:22at. A cooking fire is a handful of coals, because flame blackens a pot, and coals cook the food.
08:315. A wood stove or a fireplace, if you are fortunate enough to have one. You can cook on top
08:38of any wood stove with a flat surface, and if you have a trivet, you can hold a pot just
08:44off the hottest part, and keep a stew going all afternoon.
08:48I will say plainly that most of you do not have one of these, which is exactly why it is
08:54number 5 and not number 1.
08:586. Cast Iron. Whatever you are cooking on, use one heavy pan. A thin pan over a real flame will
09:08scorch everything in the middle while the edges stay cold, and a thin pan on a grill will warp.
09:15Heavy iron takes heat slowly, spreads it, and holds it long after you take it off, and it does not
09:23care whether it is on a stove, a grate, or a bed of coals. One good pan is worth more
09:30than a cupboard of light ones.
09:327. The lid. This sounds like nothing, and it is not nothing. A pot with the lid on comes to
09:41the boil in a fraction of the time, and uses a fraction of the fuel.
09:45And when your fuel is a canister with a finite amount in it, that fraction is the difference between 3
09:52hot meals and 1. Lid on, always, and take it off to look as little as you can stand.
10:028. Now the one I actually want you to take away from this, because it is the old answer, and
10:08it is better than any of the equipment.
10:109. It is called a hay box, or a fireless cooker, and my great-grandmother would have had one.
10:179. You bring your pot to a hard, rolling boil on whatever heat you have, and you hold it there
10:24for 10 or 15 minutes.
10:2610. Then you take it off, lid on tight, and you bury it in insulation.
10:3111. A box packed with hay, which is where the name comes from, or a cooler, or a cardboard box
10:38stuffed with blankets and towels and a cushion on top.
10:4211. Pack it so no air can move round the pot. Then you walk away and leave it 3 to
10:496 hours.
10:5012. It will still be hot when you come back, and whatever is in it will be cooked through.
10:5512. Beans, a stew, rice, oatmeal, a tough piece of meat. All of it cooks perfectly well in a hay
11:04box.
11:0513. Think about what that does to your arithmetic. You have paid 15 minutes of fuel for a meal that
11:11would have taken 3 hours of fuel,
11:14and you did not have to sit and watch it, and nothing burned to the bottom.
11:1814. In the hard winters, people cooked whole households this way, and it was not a hardship, it was simply
11:26how it was done.
11:2715. There is no equipment to buy, and nothing to go wrong, and I would rather you knew this one
11:33thing than owned the most expensive stove in the catalog.
11:3716. Three things make it work properly, and I want to give you all three because a hay box done
11:44carelessly is the one item on this list that could make somebody ill.
11:4916. Fill the pot. At least two-thirds and more if you can.
11:5417. The heat is stored in the food and the water, so a half-empty pot has half the heat
12:00in it and goes cold before it has finished the job.
12:0417. It has to be genuinely boiling when it goes in, not simmering, not nearly there.
12:1118. A hard, rolling boil, held, and then straight into the box with no standing about on the counter while
12:19you find the blankets.
12:2019. Pack the box first, then boil, and when you open it, it should still be properly hot.
12:2720. If it has only come back lukewarm, something was wrong with the packing or the pot was too small,
12:35and the thing to do then is put it back on the heat and bring it to a boil again
12:40before anybody eats it.
12:4221. Hot or boiled again, not warm.
12:4721. A good thermos is the small version of the same idea.
12:5222. Pour boiling water onto oats or rice or a soup mix, seal it, and leave it an hour or
13:00two.
13:0023. Breakfast cooks itself overnight while you sleep and costs you one kettle.
13:0724. If you have a thermos in a cupboard, that is a cooker and you did not know it.
13:1325. A solar oven, and I will be plain about this one.
13:1825. On a bright day it will cook, slowly and gently, and it is lovely.
13:2426. On a gray day it will do nothing at all, and the storm that took your power out is
13:30not usually followed by brilliant sunshine.
13:3326. Worth having, not worth relying on.
13:3627. And I should say here that our communities are not all the same, because people write to me as
13:43though there were one Amish way of doing a thing.
13:4627. There is not.
13:4728. Every district settles its own rules.
13:5029. The strictest orders cook on wood and nothing else.
13:5529. In my community we allow propane, which will run a range and an oven without one inch of it
14:02touching the public grid.
14:0329. The line we all hold is the same line, which is no connection to the utility.
14:1029. How you get your fire behind that line varies from one district to the next.
14:1530. Now, what to put in the pot, because this changes too.
14:2030. Eat your refrigerator first. It is the thing with a clock running on it.
14:2631. Then the freezer, which, if you leave the door shut, will hold for a day or two on its
14:32own.
14:3231. And that is the whole trick with the freezer.
14:3531. Every time somebody opens it to have a look, you spend some of what is left.
14:4032. Decide what is coming out, open it once, take everything at the same time, and shut it.
14:4833. A full freezer holds far longer than a half-empty one, so if you know weather is coming, fill
14:56the gaps with jugs of water and they will freeze and work for you later.
15:0134. Then, and only then, the cupboard, because the cupboard is not going anywhere.
15:0735. Cook one pot, not a meal, with four parts to it.
15:1135. Everything in, together.
15:1436. Favor things that cook fast or need no real cooking at all once they are warm.
15:1936. Tinned food only needs heating through, not cooking.
15:2337. Pasta, couscous, oats, tinned beans, tinned fish, a tin of tomatoes.
15:3037. Things that want an hour of boiling are what the haybox is for.
15:3438. And put your water on first.
15:3739. If there is any notice on the water where you live, a rolling boil for a full minute makes
15:43it safe.
15:4439. Three minutes if you are up high in the mountains.
15:4739. That matters more than dinner does, and we have a whole video on finding 40 gallons of water you
15:53already own without buying a single bottle.
15:5739. Now, who gains from the way this was handled? And I do not think anybody did it on purpose.
16:0340. A list is a hard thing to write.
16:0640. Whoever wrote it had to fit it on a page and had to assume nothing about the reader.
16:1241. And food that needs no cooking is a sensible thing to put on a page because it cannot go
16:18wrong.
16:1841. But a list tells you what to buy, and buying is the easy half.
16:2441. Nobody can sell you the knowing.
16:2742. There is no product called knowing that your gas burners will light with a match,
16:3242. And no shop had a sale on hay boxes last week, and so a nation went out and bought
16:39four times the usual number of torches,
16:4142. And not one person sold them the thing that would have made the soup hot.
16:4742. That is worse than a conspiracy, because a conspiracy can be exposed.
16:5243. This is just what happens when the only instruction anybody receives comes in the form of a shopping list.
16:5943. The shops did very well out of it.
17:0244. The households did about half as well as they think they did.
17:0744. And here is the part that has stayed with me all week.
17:1145. Everything I have just described, every single item, was ordinary knowledge within living memory.
17:1845. My grandmother did not think a hay box was clever.
17:2246. She thought it was Tuesday.
17:2446. Lighting a fire under a pot was not a skill.
17:2747. It was simply how food became hot.
17:3147. We did not lose that because we got stupid.
17:3447. We lost it because for about 70 years nobody needed it.
17:3948. And a thing nobody needs stops being taught in one generation and is gone in two.
17:4648. The switch worked every time you pressed it.
17:4949. So why would you teach a child about a box full of hay?
17:5349. And that is the thing I would like you to hold on to out of all of this,
17:5749. Because it is more use than any list.
18:0049. What went missing was never the equipment.
18:0449. You have a grill and a pot and a box and some blankets already,
18:0950. And most of you have a stove that will light with a match.
18:1350. The hay box is not a device. It is a thing you know.
18:1851. It cannot be bought, it cannot sell out, and nobody can be first in the queue for it.
18:2451. Which means the people who were calmest last week were not the ones with the fullest cupboards.
18:3151. They were the ones who already knew what they would do.
18:3552. And that knowing was free, and it was available to every single person in that queue.
18:4252. The question was never what you have to eat. It was what you have to cook it with.
18:4852. So do one thing tonight and it will take you two minutes.
18:5253. Go to your stove and find out whether it will light with a match.
18:5753. Then look round your kitchen and your garden and your garage and count the things that could put heat
19:04under a pot.
19:0554. Most of you will find three or four you had forgotten you owned, and knowing that number is worth
19:12more than another case of beans.
19:1554. Then come and tell me in the comments what your stove did when you tried it, and what you
19:20found when you counted.
19:2154. I want to hear from people who found more than they expected, and from people who found nothing, because
19:29both of those are useful to everybody else reading.
19:3255. And tell me how many times the power has gone out where you live in the past year, and
19:38how long the longest one was.
19:4155. I think the answers are going to vary enormously, and I would like us all to see it.
19:4755. Next time, I want to go through the things that run out that are not food at all, because
19:53that is the other half of what nobody bought last week.
19:5755. Medicine you cannot refill, cash when the card machines are down, the size of battery you actually need rather
20:04than the one you have a drawer full of, and what you do about a toilet when the water is
20:09off.
20:0955. None of that was on the shelves, because nobody panics about any of it, and every one of them
20:15bites sooner than hunger does.
20:1855. Thank you for sitting with me. Go and try your stove. The people who built this country with their
20:24hands knew that, and we are only just starting to remember it.
20:2855.afety-family.
20:2865.
20:28You