Made vacuum sealing more consistent

[jkraybill]

Summary

SUMMARY: Content "Made vacuum sealing and salted food more consistent"

Purpose of change

Fixes #38613, and fixed up some other issues with vacuum sealing and salted foods.

Describe the solution

While I was looking at #38613, I found several issues and fixed them all at once:

• the base issue was that the vacuum sealer recipes were producing generally half the amount of ingredients the bag holds. Maybe this was intentional but I agree with the sentiment in Vacuum sealed fruit and veggies are only half filled #38613 that this looks wrong, so changed the recipes to fill the bags.
• salted fish was getting weird values for price/weight/volume as a result of using "stack_size". I removed stack_size from the definition, which fixed the inheritance issue and AFAIK doesn't carry any negative side effects.
• the multiple for salted fish weight/volume seemed too low based on this article where the average resulting weight/volume of dried fish is 34.5%, so I changed it to that.
• salted fish was overriding the vitamins of normal fish in an inconsistent way. I re-did the vitamins for fish to be consistent with river trout based on the nutrition facts here, and stopped salted fish from overwriting them: https://www.fitbit.com/foods/Trout+Cooked/20686
• salt-related components related to preservation were being used inconsistently, so I made them a cooking component and replaced them in salted food recipes. I questioned black pepper as a preserving item, but based on an article I read I do believe it can legitimately be used for short-term anti-microbial preservation like we are doing here.
• bumped up the vacuum sealer recipes to require enough product to fill the charges of the bag: 2 for meat/veg, 5 for fish, 8 for fruit.
• vacuum sealer recipes had a time requirement that seemed way off to me: 20 minutes per bag with an 83% savings at 5 bags. That's not how vacuum sealing works. I changed it to 5 minutes per bag with a 10% savings at 3 bags, which is more in line with my experience with vacuum sealing.
• salted fish/meat/veg previously required water as part of the recipe (clean or unclean). This seemed like overkill as just throwing salt and meat in a bag would be sufficient. I removed water as an ingredient except for fruit slices.
• standardized fruit slice recipe to use the crafting component for sugar and related substitutes instead of just sugar.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Only changing the output of the recipes, but there was too much other wackiness for me to leave the rest as-is.

Also considered making vacuum sealed bags only hold 250 mL of stuff, but that's pretty tiny.

Considered adding additional "single unit" vacuum sealing recipes, to allow 1 unit to be vacuum sealed, but I thought that may clog up the crafting menu unnecessarily, plus it is somewhat realistic as vacuum sealing very small quantities is problematic. Also requiring more than one unit to vacuum seal is a slight counterbalance to how good vacuum sealing is for preservation with just plastic bags.

Testing

Made the vacuum sealed goods before and after, checked the vitamins and weights/volumes. Output of the vacuum sealing crafting recipes now looks like this:

Additional context

Some of this work was on my slate to look at after 0.E but this bug seemed legit enough to dive in and improve the system now. I think this is minor enough to get merged now, but I wouldn't disagree with holding this in content freeze if the maintainers deem it so!

[sharkfinsouperman]

the multiple for salted fish weight/volume seemed too low based on this article where the average resulting weight/volume of dried fish is 34.5%, so I changed it to that.

In the vacuum fillet recipe, water is included, which makes me think this is in a brine solution rather than being salt dried dried. Am I wrong?

Edit: I should have finished reading before commenting, but I still think what you felt was overkill and removed (the added water) was actually part of the brine solution.

[jkraybill]

@sharkfinsouperman - maybe? I don't know what the original intent was. It did seem weird that the recipe allowed unclean water but there is no cooking involved, since salt wouldn't fix that. I removed it because if you're vacuum sealing meat/fish, and adding salt to it, you don't need to add water to get a preserving effect. But if that's controversial, I'm happy to add it back!

[Maleclypse]

I think if you are finding recipes that only involve salt just post a link or snip of the recipe and then it will be good as is. :) I couldn't find any brine vacuum sealing recipes that didn't also involve freezing so I think you are correct that salt would like be the only ingredient for non freezing recipes.

[sharkfinsouperman]

I couldn't find any brine vacuum sealing recipes that didn't also involve freezing

I can't find one either, so it makes more sense to use dry salting instead of brine unless the presence of a working freezer is added as being necessary to complete the recipe.

If the food is being dry salted, shouldn't brine-like ingredients such as saline, soy sauce and salt water be removed from the recipes, seeing as these add liquid while the goal of dry salting is to partially desiccate the food using dry ingredients, and brine recipes require a freezer in some cases?

[jkraybill]

Unless someone else gets to it first, I do have a post-0.E "survival food" overhaul planned where I'm going to start by looking at all the preservation recipes and making them a little more rational. There are known issues with canning recipes and methods of smoking too. It will fit nicely with the book learning project by breaking up some high-value knowledge about food preservation into multiple books.