Part of Phase 1: First Month
Food in Phase 1 means turning a raw harvest into something actually edible, and these fifteen articles split into three jobs: getting grain out of its husk and into flour, turning that flour into bread, and cooking everything else over heat sources that don’t require an oven at all. A rotary quern grinds 2-5 kg of flour an hour against a saddle quern’s 500 g, and a watermill reaches 20-50 kg — each jump in the chain changes what a day’s labor can actually feed.
Grain Processing is the overview of the first job: grain straight from the field is inedible until it passes through threshing, winnowing, and sometimes hulling. Threshing swings a flail overhead against spread sheaves to knock the grain loose — gently for beans, which crack under force wheat tolerates fine. Winnowing then separates grain from chaff by exploiting how differently they fall: wheat grain drops at 8-12 m/s while its chaff drops at just 0.3-1.5 m/s, clearable by hand in an ordinary breeze. Grinding and Milling and Rotary Quern cover what comes after: output climbs from half a kilogram an hour at a mortar or saddle quern to 2-5 kg at a rotary quern — as long as its furrows get re-cut every so often — and 20-50 kg at a watermill. Food Processing is the broadest article in this group: it needs fire-making and basic farming already in place, and what it produces underpins flatbread, beer, and more.
Bread Making, Sourdough Starter, Sourdough, and Baking Methods turn that flour into something eaten. Flatbread needs no yeast at all and is ready in about 20 minutes on a hot stone; a sourdough starter is just equal parts flour and water fed daily, and before commercial yeast existed, every risen loaf in history came from a culture exactly like it. Baking Methods covers the no-oven option — bury a dough disc in hot ash and coals for 15-25 minutes until it sounds hollow when tapped.
Cooking Techniques, Earth Oven, Clay Oven Build, Rocket Stove, and Stone Boiling cover heat sources beyond baking specifically. Cooking Techniques is the overview of five primitive methods, most of which work better over a bed of coals than over open flame. Earth Oven and Stone Boiling are both no-direct-flame options: an earth oven cooks on fired rocks buried under leaves and soil for hours unattended (though river stones and flint can explode if used instead of granite), and stone boiling drops fire-heated rocks into a water-filled basket or hide pouch to boil food in a container that could never survive sitting over flame. Clay Oven Build and Rocket Stove are the two built structures: a clay oven cures over four days of progressively bigger fires into something that bakes several loaves above 300°F, and a rocket stove’s insulated J-tube burns hot enough to consume its own smoke on a fraction of the wood an open fire wastes to the air.
Grain to Flour
Separating grain from chaff, then grinding it, in the order the overview article itself lays out.
Bread and Fermentation
Turning flour into a risen or flat loaf, with or without a culture kept alive by daily feeding.
Cooking and Ovens
Heat sources beyond baking: an overview of five primitive methods, then the specific ovens, pits, and boiling tricks that implement them.