How to stop time or pause the game in Factorio

I just started playing Factorio and as I go through the tutorial, I find myself constantly wasting a lot of time trying to find the things I need to build in my inventory. While I manually hover over dozens of tiny icons to find which one is the "boiler", for example, biters show up and kill me before I'm halfway through my objectives.

Is there a way to "freeze" time in-game, so I can inspect my inventory items without worrying that biters will appear to kill me? I tried hitting 'Esc', which does pause the game, but it shows a game menu and I can't interact with my inventory while paused.