Build 42 Cooking — Soups, Canning, Drying Racks, and the Post-Fridge Plan

Cooking in Build 42 is half kitchen, half logistics: the evolved-recipe system rewards skill with stretching nutrition, but the real game is keeping food edible after the power dies — jarring, drying racks, jerky, and freezer math. This guide covers the skill's verified numbers and every preservation route on stable 42.20, from PZwiki's Cooking and Food pages (42.18-era stamps). Recipe lists live in our recipes guide; this page is about mechanics. Checked 2026-08-04.

What the Cooking skill actually does

Each level stretches ingredients and boosts nutrition:

From level 7 you can safely fold small amounts of rotten food into dishes — a genuine late-game economy for a base drowning in half-spoiled harvest. Higher levels also make it easier to detect poison in evolved recipes (3+ ingredients can carry bleach or worse) and harder for your own poison to be caught; detected food gets a skull icon. Chef (+4) and Burger Flipper (+2) remain the cooking starts (occupation costs).

Soups, stews, and the pot economy

Pot meals are the workhorse for feeding a base: they stack many ingredients into one container, eat over multiple servings, and cook over any heat source (fire pit, campfire, stove). Verified timers from the food table:

Cooking generally extends the rot clock versus raw ingredients and improves effects; leaving food on an active heat source too long burns it, wrecking the benefits and adding sickness risk. Set timers — a burnt stew is a full inventory loss.

Spoilage: the numbers behind the clock

• Perishables move fresh → stale → rotten; stale food is worse, rotten food is dangerous — eating it has a high chance of sickness, mitigated by lemongrass or the Iron Gut trait.
• Refrigeration multiplies time-to-spoil by 5× (blue overlay). Freezing stops decay entirely once the item reads "frozen" — e.g., fish fillets go stale in 2 days raw, 10 days refrigerated, and last forever fully frozen (fishing supply).
• Non-perishables (chocolate, pop, beef jerky, butter) never rot — stockpile them and use them as recipe ingredients.
• Rotten surplus isn't waste: it feeds the composter for fertilizer (farming loop).

Preservation routes (your post-fridge toolbox)

Jars themselves can come from glassmaking (Glass Jar at Glassmaking 5) or loot — another reason the glass chain pays.

When the fridge dies: the route

1. Triage: cook every raw perishable today; a cooked meal buys days the raw item didn't have.
2. Jar the surplus vegetables now, before they hit stale (stale ingredients still work; rotten needs Cooking 7).
3. Freezer decision: a fridge or freezer on generator power draws 0.008–0.013 L/h — sustainable only with real fuel income. Full math in the generator guide and the shutoff prep checklist.
4. Winter is your freezer: December–February, an unheated room or outdoor crate replaces the appliance entirely.

Leveling the skill

XP comes from cooking at heat sources, crafting cooking recipes, and adding evolved-recipe ingredients. Books I–V ("Better Burger Flipping" through "Ruban Vert Gourmet") cover 1–10, and The Cook Show airs every morning 6 AM on Life and Living TV (day 1 gives +112.5 — entertainment XP caps at level 3, so watch early). Magazines: Delicious Meals, Good Cooking (May/June 1993), Grandma's Kitchen, Italian Delights, World Cooking.

Verified on 42.20 · Last checked 2026-08-04

Skill scaling, poison detection, spoilage rules, refrigeration ×5, freeze-stops-decay, and pot timers come from PZwiki's Cooking and Food pages (42.18.0 stamps) re-checked against 42.20.0. Canning inputs, the post-jarring heat requirement, and the 60+30 day jar shelf life come from PZwiki's Jar page; there is no bottle-cap sealing system in the build. Omitted: exact per-item fresh/rot tables beyond the examples above (huge on the wiki), and drying-rack build requirements, which the wiki hasn't documented — treat those as "exists, verify in your build menu."