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.

42.21/42.22 kitchen notes

• Appliances need real power. 42.22 fixed toasters and coffee machines working without grid or generator supply — a base that "had power" for small appliances only may now be dry.
• The fridge dies gradually (42.21). On the day the grid fails, fridges and freezers warm up over time instead of instantly spoiling everything, and food stored in a bag inside a fridge now gets proper refrigeration. That buys hours to cook down or jar the contents (shutoff prep).
• 86 more containers can purify water (42.21). The list of fluid containers usable in ovens and stoves grew substantially — try the pot or can you already have before hauling a dedicated cooking pot home.
• Don't sleep next to the smell (42.22). A Bad Smell moodle — corpses, generator fumes — now blocks sleep entirely, which matters for any kitchen-and-generator room setup.

Verified on 42.20 stable & 42.22 Pre-Release · Last checked 2026-10-30

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." Gradual shutoff warming, bag refrigeration, the 86 extra purification containers (42.21) and the appliance power fix (42.22) come from the official release notes for those builds.