Kitchen Tools

If you were to outfit the perfect homestead kitchen, what would you include? This was my question to Sunshine a few days ago. This post will outline some of what we have to suggest.

She asked for what setting: On grid or off grid slants the answers quite a bit. I replied that I wanted to know everything, and she rolled her eyes. Well, here is a start to the list.


Basic categories:

1) Food cleaning / prep
2) Water supply
3) Food cooking
4) Food preservation


If you are on grid, you need to consider ways you would achieve the desired goals without power. There will be extensive and prolonged outages in the future. One way would be a self powered system such as solar power or wind / hydro power.

Some of the tools Sunshine likes best use a lot of power. She likes the VitaMix blender, and a grain grinding mill.

For cooking, we have an electric cook top and oven, a portable propane double burner, and a restored antique wood fueled cook stove.

For canning, you need glass jars and reusable canning lids.

Various pots, pans and pressure cookers are useful for everyday cooking, simmering and pressure canning.

Sunshine likes two small pressure cookers to cook rice, beans, potatoes or other long cooking items. Bringing them up to pressure cooks the food much faster.

We enjoy a food dehydrator, and these foods do perfectly in winter soups.