🔗 Save $6,000 A Year with My Complete Amish Home-Saving Method I teach: https://eliasyoder.com The pan is on fire. You stepped away for a minute, the oil went past hot and caught, and there is a sheet of flame standing a foot out of that skillet. And every instinct you have is wrong.

You want to pick the pan up and carry it to the sink. Do not. You will be walking across a kitchen with a torch in your hand and it will slop.

You want to throw water on it. Do not. Water hits burning oil, turns to steam in an instant, and blows the fire out in every direction.

That is the commonest way a small kitchen fire becomes a house fire. Here is the order, and it takes four seconds. Turn the heat off.

Slide a lid across the top of the pan, slide it rather than drop it so your hand stays behind it. Then leave it alone until the pan is cold. Do not lift the lid to look.

That is first and that is best. Salt is what you reach for when there is no lid, and there is a very good reason to keep a box of it within arm's reach of your stove. Not a pinch.

A great deal of it, thrown low at the base of the flames. Salt does not burn and does not react. It lies down on the oil and shuts the air off, which is the lid's job done with a solid.

Never flour. Never sugar. And if the flames have left the pan and got into the hood or a cupboard, you are past the point where anything in your kitchen will help.

Get everybody out, shut the door behind you, and call from outside. The rest of the video is about salt, because that box does ten other jobs and every one of them comes from a single thing salt does. My grandfather showed me in the smokehouse.

We packed a ham in a box of dry salt and I ran it through my fingers, and there was no wet in it anywhere. The next morning there was liquid standing in the bottom of the box. I asked who had poured water in.

Nobody had been near it but the two of us. Then he asked me where I supposed it had come from. The ten: Cleaning the melted mess off the face of an iron A dropped egg, and why the salt makes it sweepable A burnt pan, and the cast iron method that never touches the seasoning A sour sponge or dishcloth A fresh stain, and why fresh is the whole trick Cleaning inside a narrow bottle you cannot get a brush into The brown ring in a coffee cup Wilting flowers and limp greens Slugs, and why I am uneasy about it Ice on a step, which leads straight to the harm And the three places it does real damage: steel, because salt holds water against metal and will not let it dry; concrete, because salt water soaks into the pores and flakes the face off a step over a few winters; and any ground you want things to grow in, because salt does not break down and does not wash away quickly.

For most steps, grit is the better answer. Sand, ash out of the stove, or fine gravel. It melts nothing but it gives you your feet back, which is what you actually wanted, and it does nothing to metal at all.

The plain limit: salt is not a disinfectant. It holds spoilage back by taking water away, which matters a great deal over days and does nothing at all in a minute on a counter. Tonight, go and stand at your stove and answer two questions out loud.

Which lid covers your biggest frying pan, and where is it right now? Tell me in the comments whether you could answer that without going to look. Be truthful.

I had to check myself before I wrote this and I was not pleased with the answer. Next time we go through plain baking soda the same way, because it works from the other end entirely. I gathered the whole of it into a book at eliasyoder dot com.

The people who built this country with their hands knew that, and we are only just starting to remember it. #EliasYoder #KitchenSafety #GreaseFire #FireSafety #SaltHacks #HouseholdTips #CastIron #Frugal #OldWays #CleaningHacks #Homesteading #SelfReliance #LifeHacks #KitchenTips #Winter