Cooking Oil: what do you do when the Wesson oil is gone?

[chairborne commando]

I was thinking, which I do from time to time, about cooking, in disasters
and assorted Teotwawki scenarios and coincidentally started dinner.

Gasp! No cooking oil. No olive oil and not even a half stick of butter.

I know, the quick answer is store gallons of the stuff in big cans and
worry about it later, but I was wondering what you would do when the
last bottle/jar/can is gone.

Sure, you can use things like lard-which I am not a fan of, or, I suppose,
throw a slice or two of fatback in the skillet or pot.

Can you make cooking oil? Olive oil, sure. Always assuming you have olives
and its the right time of year and you know how-or guess correctly.

How about vegetable/corn oil?

What is everybody doing regarding this prep item? Before anybody mentions
it, yes I did look it up on Google. I was referred to my local grocer.

 

[lynnie]

Well, for the first time in my life last month I bought some non stick frying pans at Walmart, and they have nice non stick griddles too, back in camping supplies.

They actually work!!

You'll probably get some posts here about the evils of teflon....but if you run out of oil it sure beats cast iron!

 

[Frogger]

Most foods that are normally fried in oil can be steamed in a covered fry pan with a small amount of water. I do my eggs that way every morning.

 

[LoupGarou]

I stored as part of my preps, over 20 packets of seeds for sunflowers. Plant, grow, and harvest and you have sunflower seeds. Squeeze seeds and you can get sunflower oil.

Loup Garou

 

[Onebyone]

Sunflower seeds, flax seeds, butternut tree nuts are very oily. The Indians use to harvest the Butternut oil and spread it on their bread. You can certainly press olives for oil but it takes a few years before the trees will produce olives to do it.

Your body needs oils so hopefully everyone will think of a source.

 

[horse and hammer]

oops

 

[Tundra Gypsy]

Does anyone know how you'd go about making butternut oil? I have two huge, old butternut trees in my front yard at my Idaho house. I guess I'll fight the squirrels for some of those nuts this year and try and press some of the oil out of the nuts.

 

[Christian for Israel]

we have plenty of lard.

hydrogenated oils...

 

[Windy Ridge]

Corn oil mostly comes from a special type of corn that you probably will not be able to find seed for. The percentage of oil in it is too low to produce much by any home method I can think of. The sunflower seeds sold as bird seed are the kind used for oil production. Once hulled they can be processed for oil much more easily as they have a very high oil content. The sunflower seeds from garden seed companies are of the varieties that produce the seeds used to snack on. They have a much lower oil content than the oil seed/bird food kind. The oil varieties of soybeans are another possible source and don't have to be dehulled like sunflower seeds but I don't know where to get the oilseed varieties. The varieties sold by the garden seed people have a much lower oil content.

Windy Ridge

 

[Seabird]

Good chicken soup stock provides a great source of cooking fat. Also, when I make carmelized onions with mushrooms, the resulting liquids make an awesome cooking oil. (The onions and mushroom liquid is more water than oil, but it sure makes eggs taste good when they are cooked in it.) Also, my grandmother used to save the fats from meats in a old coffee can that she treasured as if it were gold.


One way to preserve what cooking oils you have is to take a page from the PAM play book, and get a spritzer bottle to spray whatever oil you are using.

Keep coming up with ideas, this question is a good one. I'm looking forward to the answers, too.

 

[Chronicles]

Keep all parts of every critter, in an emergency survival situtation.

Ground hogs, Opossum, deer, pigs and all cattle, like sheep, goats, even a horse has some fats.

It will be necessary to use everthing you get from the start of the emergency. Use everything as if it was your last. Keep many old cans and mark them as to whats what. Beef fat is tasty, and bacon fat is also good.

Some like opossum fat is yucky tasting, but can be used for many non-stick uses or even a fuel for an oil lamp.

IF? TSHTF things are going to be tough for a long time.

 

[Wise Owl]

Don't forget the dehydrated #10 cans of butter and margarine that you can buy.
Those are my backups...but the large cans of olive oil and some of veggie oil are staples. Mostly use the olive oil for health benefits...veggie oil is a back up for that.

Yes the fats from all meats are great. I keep all the new plastic coffee cans that Folgers puts their coffee in. Great for storage either in the pantry or the fridge/freezer......not just fats but soups. flour, whatever. My hubby used them to store some of his stuff in.

 

[Nuthatch]

Seabird has it right. Saving any and all cooking fats from meats. Chicken fat is great and we like it better than beef fat.

Don't neglect to consider getting a goat/cow now to milk and therefore get butter fats. Or make friends with someone who has them.

I really don't see that I would be able to adequately squeeze oil from a seed. But you can still get the fats in your diet by eating the nuts/seeds. Have you ever cooked corn with black walnuts? Of course, we add some butter because we have it

 

[tosca]

Preserve some bacon and render the fat

as needed. Render beef and pork now...and save the fat in small ceramic jars...will last a long, long time. Or can the fat as you do butter to save alot. PS: Besure to strain it before canning.

 

[Vere My Sone]

growing up, my Mother always kept a cheese crock on the back of the stove into which she poured the bacon drippings

 

[rryan]

I'm with CfI on this----no hydrogenated oils here.

I would like to find a source for bulk bacon grease though----anything fried like chicken tastes so much better in bacon grease. hell, I bake with it too.

 

[Cardinal]

I'm with CfI on this----no hydrogenated oils here.

I would like to find a source for bulk bacon grease though----anything fried like chicken tastes so much better in bacon grease. hell, I bake with it too.

Pigs That is why small farms all had them. We will be going back to doing that.

 

[MaxTheKnife]

Coconut oil would be my choice. It stores at room temp almost indefinately. I know it's expensive, but when prepping, sometimes the value of a thing means more than the money it takes to buy it. And as a prep item, one 5-gallon bucket of coconut oil would be a one time purchase for all intents and purposes. Just my 2:cent: worth.

 

[oldladydoolin]

I'm with CfI on this----no hydrogenated oils here.

I would like to find a source for bulk bacon grease though----anything fried like chicken tastes so much better in bacon grease. hell, I bake with it too.

My family thinks I'm nuts because I put bacon grease in everything.

 

[bluefire]

To expand on what onebyone said, I would be growing any and all nut trees that would do well in my growing zone. They would suffice in adding needed oils to one's diet. I'd also be sure to have a cow -- milk, butter and cheese are all high on my list of priorities.

 

[gillmanNSF]

Good ideas, keep 'em coming. I have a couple of costco sized vegetable oil containers stored, but I know these have a short shelf life. I'd not heard of canned oils before, I wonder how much longer these will last in storage. The coconut oil sound ideal, even though I've not cooked with it before. So where does one get canned or coconut oil?

I found this basic information on the shelf life of oils at: http://waltonfeed.com/grain/faqs/iie.html Notice the name at the bottom, Misc.Survivalism FAQs maintained by........ Same as our TB2K prepper?

Edited to add a website I just found that sells coconut oil, though doesn't state how long it will last. http://www.wildernessfamilynaturals...erm=pure+coconut+oil&utm_campaign=Coconut+Oil

 

[GrayBear]

Subsistence Living in the 1930's - -

Keep all parts of every critter, in an emergency survival situation.

Ground hogs, Opossum, deer, pigs and all cattle, like sheep, goats, even a horse has some fats.

It will be necessary to use everything you get from the start of the emergency. Use everything as if it was your last. Keep many old cans and mark them as to whats what. Beef fat is tasty, and bacon fat is also good.

Some like opossum fat is yucky tasting, but can be used for many non-stick uses or even a fuel for an oil lamp.

IF? TSHTF things are going to be tough for a long time.

What Chronicles proposed is what we did when I was growing up along the Brazos River in East Texas in the 1930's. Everything not eaten was "rendered" for the fat. A note about possum oil is that my grandma wanted us to shoot and bring in every possum we found.

She made the oil into an ointment the older local people bought, or traded for, to use as a lotion for arthritis and "the rumatiz." She made more money off that per pound than she did off her butter she sold.

You could get a good amount or grease from rendered ducks and geese, too, especially from the geese.

You get hungry enough, you worry very little about chlorestrol and "good" or "bad" oils.

GrayBear

 

[WildDaisy]

Oddly, I dont use cooking oil all that much. Very rarely if perhaps we are having french fries or something. But I rarely make fried food otherwise. As for baking needs, I dont go through all that much of it.

 

[monkeyface]

cry

 

[Jmurman]

I'll have to get after one of those big whales and git me some blubber.

 

[Mushroom]

I think you can buy schav (rendered chicken fat) in the stores around Eastertime. commercial lard keeps really well. nut oils can be made in a metal bowl with something to mash them to a pulp. When they are pulped, add water, stir, and skim off the oil. Nut oil doesn't keep very long so don't make a whole lot at a time. Peanut oil can be made the same way. After getting the oils out, pour the pulp out in a shallow pan and let the water evaporate off and use the leftover pulp as an addition to baking flour. Waste not want not. When you do sunflower seeds, peeling or hulling them is a pain and if you don't need the leftover pulp, you can just mash them with the hulls on and float off the oil. Feed the leftovers to the chickens or lure in some birds with it.

Mushroom

 

[nomifyle]

There is nothing like cast iron for healthy cooking and I haven't had cooking oil in my kitchen for many years. I don't deep fry anything. We bake all of our meat. I may brown something in olive oil but that's it. No one in my immediate family has any chronic illnesses and I am turning 59 on Friday.

Bacon grease makes anything taste good, but don't have much of that around. And butter, you can use that in so many foods.

No coated cookware in my house.

Blessings,

Judy