Essential food “how tos”, please share them if you have them

Discussion in 'Back to Basics' started by Equilibrium, Jan 12, 2011.


  1. Equilibrium

    Equilibrium Monkey++

    Humans are animals.... something I need to keep reminding myself. We have the very same essential needs for food, water, shelter, and a place to raise young sustainably as any other animal. My family falls flat on its face living sustainably and it’s pretty obvious…. to me at least…. our lifestyle won’t continue indefinitely. Our home provides two habitat essentials with grocery stores and public utilities providing us with the other two just as long as we ignore that word sustainable. I’ve come to terms with a day when food might not be available at a grocery store or if it is…. my family won’t be able to afford much more than mac and cheese so lately my focus is on food. It would be really helpful to me if folk would share their food “how tos” from personal stashes. Here’s one from my stash, Grandpappy's Homemade Sugar Recipe - by Robert Wayne Atkins, P.E.. I saved the homemade sugar “how to” in a file I made titled, “Might be useful some day”. My file doesn’t have much in it but I’d really like to “bulk” it with good “stuff” from other folk saving “how tos” for a rainy day.
     
  2. tacmotusn

    tacmotusn RIP 1/13/21

    This is an excellent informative post. You gotta love "Grandpappy's" wisdom. I love his website. You might want to check me on this, but if I remember correctly, sugar maple sap is only 2.5 percent sugar, so they have to boil it down, reducing it close to 40 to 1 to get maple syrup. This jumps to mind because watermelon pulp is 10 percent sugar. Do you see where I am going. A natural sweetener could be extracted from watermelon pulp quite easily, as a syrup or crystalized sugar, or to make an alcoholic beverage. Not only that, but down here where I live, they don't harvest every watermelon from the fields. They take those that will make the grade for sale. Most of the rest rot in the fields, and can often be harvested for livestock fodder or whatever just by asking nicely. Ideas, ideas, ideas.
     
  3. ghrit

    ghrit Bad company Administrator Founding Member

    What's the yield of sugar from beets? (More to the point, how many bushels of beets do you have to boil to get a pound of sugar?)
     
  4. Equilibrium

    Equilibrium Monkey++

    I've not tried this yet soI can't answer your question. I will be trying it this summer but that doesn't help you now. Anytime I find something like this I try to put it to use ASAP to see if it's worth my time and energy or not but... I'm being told by personal friends that beets have the highest yield and that specific varieties of beets such as 'Chioggia' and 'Ruby Queen' can produce even higher yields. Perhaps someone who has 1st hand experience can help.
     
  5. Falcon15

    Falcon15 Falco Peregrinus

    Using the original methods to extract sugar, about 10%...ie. 100# sugar beets will yield approx 10# sugar.


    You will be left with unrefined sugar, essentially a dark colored crystal. Treat it like unrefined sugar, use sparingly - it can be very bitter. Sugar beet refiners apparently have a super-secret process that utilizes milk of lime and carbonation along with a few other steps to refine the raw sugar into white sugar.




    A reasonably good site with some basic graphics representing the various stages can be found here.
     
  6. ghrit

    ghrit Bad company Administrator Founding Member

    Thanx for that.

    will be bitter tasting
    Now I know where the shipboard sugar came from, and why I still drink my coffee black.
     
  7. Falcon15

    Falcon15 Falco Peregrinus

    LMAO that, my friend is exactly gospel truth. I learned to drink my coffee balck during my turn in the tube.
     
  8. tacmotusn

    tacmotusn RIP 1/13/21

    Ah but that raw beet syrup might just be the ticket for my sugary wash to ferment before making a batch of fuel....lol
     
  9. Falcon15

    Falcon15 Falco Peregrinus

    Tac, you would be better off fermenting the remaining beet mash with a small portion of the sugar and distilling the resultant mess off to ethanol. The wonderful thing about making sugar syrup from beets is: whatever leftover beet pulp you have left you can feed to the animals, throw in the compost pile (feed to your plants), ferment into alcohol bearing liquid, it has a ton of useable possibilities.

    Now, at least sugar from sugar beets not like corn syrup from corn. Corn syrup involves serious chemistry - extraction of corn starch, chemically treating it to make it a surup...scary stuff .

    Anyone consider sugarcane? It grows dang near wild near here, and would make an excellent source of molasses and sugar! On top of that, it is a grass (very sustainable), you can burn the "bagasse" (leftover cane after it has been crushed and squeezed and dried) for heat. Yield from cane is 10-15% sucrose per #. There is some seriously primitive tech used in many countries to extract juice from the cane. Many "Gulf state" preppers may benefit better from cane sugar than beet sugar.
     
survivalmonkey SSL seal        survivalmonkey.com warrant canary
17282WuJHksJ9798f34razfKbPATqTq9E7