Vibrating Shaking Moving - Tumblr Posts
maybe golden carrots and golden apples keep forever, but i have a hard time believing that steak would. thinking about the ways that players would preserve food for their lifestyle is pretty interesting to me, at least. since they’re constantly on the move- running, jumping, building, fighting- they need calorie-dense food, and a lot of it.
this mostly centers on preservation through dehydration, maybe i’ll make another post about fermentation. minecraft cheese real
blaze beef jerky- dried and spiced meat, it’s easy to see how this would be a common choice for players on the go. it’s tasty, quick to eat, and relatively simple to prepare (especially since smokers canonically exist). you could make it with other types of meat and spices, but beef works the best, and i imagine blaze powder would taste nicely spicy and warming. (this is what i imagine all those stacks of steak actually are.)
dried fruits- this is also a fairly obvious one. especially to players living in hot climates, things go bad really quickly, so the neatest solution is to use the heat as a friend rather than an enemy and sun-dry your food so it stays good for longer. apples, berries, chorus fruit, and yes, watermelon too, can all be dried under the sun. to varying degrees of effectiveness, of course.
dried bread- you might not know this, but handmade bread that only has salt, water, flour, and yeast as its ingredients goes extremely stale in about a day. the starch crystallizes and hardens it all into a basically inedible mass, which is why things like french toast exist to use up hardened bread. however, double-baked bread is hard in a different way entirely- the extra cooking time keeps it delicately crispy and easy to soak in tea or broth or just eat straight-up. biscotti is a really common example, but it doesn’t have to be made sweet- you can put just about anything in it.
granola/trail mix- cooked, mashed, and dried wheatberries, dried fruit, seeds, and honey, all mixed together into easy snacking fare. this isn’t a meal, per se, but something in between to keep energy up between them.
pork sausage- chop up a bunch of meat and fat, salt and spice it and stuff it into well-cleaned animal intestines, and hang it up to dry. these are the basic tenets of sausage-making, and anyone who wants pork on demand without having to kill a pig every time has probably learned it well. common spices are probably alliums (garlic / onion), blaze powder, cinnamon, netherwart (in small doses), among many dozens of “secret ingredients” which players swear by.
dried vegetables- beets, cactus, alliums, potatoes, carrots, mushrooms, pumpkins, and kelp are all eligible to be dried, spiced, and eaten. yes, not all of these are “vegetables,” but vegetables are a made up classification that don’t exist anyway. some of these would be best used by reconstituting in a stew, but you could just eat it straight up too.
oil-packed salmon- for those who run extensive meat-processing operations and have a lot of extra animal fat on their hands, packing meat in oil is an easy option. if the bacteria has no oxygen, it can’t live, so your meat is safe to store. however, this likely isn’t an option on smaller servers or singleplayer worlds, so another choice might be clarified butter- though it wouldn’t last as long. this is an option that also would require a relative amount of knowledge- don’t botulism yourself into a respawn, kids.
pemmican- let’s get a little more creative. this is a mixture of clean animal fat, dried meat, and berries, pounded together into neat little blobs of pure energy. it can be eaten raw, or melted into a stew with wild forage (plants, vegetables, fresh meat) to supplement it. this is less a storage-food and more a travelling-food, and players on long journeys would probably pack a good amount of it for when the going gets tough. it’s an extremely calorie-dense food, and someone spending their whole day fighting, walking and climbing would need those calories desperately.
(as a side note, akutaq is animal fat whipped together with fresh berries, and it looks GOOD AS FUCK. real ice cream is achievable in minecraft in a dozen different ways, but goddamn, i’d eat the fuck out of that.)
jams and jellies- the obvious choice here is berry jam, sweet and tart, and maybe rosehip jam too. however, apple and pumpkin butter are also tasty and keep basically forever, and you can actually make jelly out of any edible flower, like dandelions, cornflowers, peonies, oxeye daisies, and lilacs. i might make a separate post just for spreads, honestly.