Packing Grain and Beans for Food Storage (The way I do it)



 

As part of my prepping plan I practice what I wrote about in my book "Poverty Prepping: How to Stock up for Tomorrow When You Can't Afford to Eat Today" (Click here to see the book).  I buy one or two 'extra' of something every month, even if it's just a one dollar bottle of a spice. 

 

In times when I have a little more money to spend I buy things like a big bag of rice, beans, flour, or sugar.  This month we were able to buy a 50-lb. bag of wheat and a 50-lb. bag of oatmeal (rolled oats).

 

Our wonderful acquisitions!

(I don't know why both bags are upside down)

 

We've been lucky in being able to get buckets with tight-fitting lids from a grocery store bakery where one of our adult children works.  Most of them are about 2 1/2 gallons, which is a good size for me.  I have a hard time carrying full five-gallon buckets, so these smaller buckets are great.  We do have a few five-gallon buckets but I need the wheel barrow to move them from the shed to the house.

 

Scooping oatmeal into a bucket.

 

These buckets have been used over and over.  When I empty them I wash them and stack them in the shed until I have something to put in them again. I keep a bag nearby for lids but somehow I always seem to have more buckets than lids. 

 

I set the bucket on a stool and then I sat on a chair and scooped oatmeal with a 6-cup plastic measuring cup until the bucket was full.  But wait.... was the bucket really full?

Holding a plate on top of the oatmeal in a bucket.

 

Some foods compress better than others, but no matter what grain or bean I'm packing into buckets, I tap on the sides to help it "settle".  If you've ever bought things like cold cereal or potato chips at a grocery store you'll see that the bags or boxes appear to be half empty when you open them.  This is because the food settles in shipping.  When you first put foods like oatmeal or flour into a bucket there is a lot of air in with them.  By tapping on the side of the bucket you can jiggle it enough that the food settles and there will be more room at the top.  Then you can add more of whatever you're putting in the bucket.

 

I like to place a plate on top and hold it down while I tap the sides of the bucket.  This helps keep the oatmeal, or whatever food, from shaking out of the bucket, but more importantly, it helps push the food down as you tap on the sides.

 

There are two reasons I like to get as much air out and pack as much into the bucket as I can.  One reason is that the more I can fit into the buckets, the fewer I need and therefore I have more buckets available when I have food to put in them.

 

The second reason is that air oxidizes food and reduces it's storage life.  Some people buy oxygen absorbers or Co2 packets to put in the buckets when they pack them.  I figure the best I can do is to get out as much air as I can by packing the food as tightly as I can into the bucket.  This works especially good with foods like flour and oatmeal.  If I'm patient I can pack an amazing amount of flour into a bucket by tapping and by tamping it down with a plate.  Hard grains like wheat are harder to compress this way, but you can still tap on them to jiggle them as snugly together as possible, and reduce the amount of air in the buckets.

 

Being smaller it's easy for us to use the food in the buckets quickly and keep them rotated.  If you're packing five-gallon buckets for long-term storage you might want to buy oxygen absorbers to place inside the buckets.  Here's some available on amazon so you can see what they look like and get an idea of price: Oxygen absorbers .  This pack is $9.99 for 100 ct.



Six buckets of oatmeal, ready to be moved out to the shed.

 

The buckets have wonderful things on the labels, like donut glaze and pink icing and cream cheese frosting!  But inside they have oatmeal.  We also have wheat, whole corn, barley, rice, pinto beans, black beans, and kidney beans in similar buckets.

I date the buckets so I can keep them rotated.

This is the wheat being scooped into a bucket.

 

Recently I also put rice in buckets.

 

I have some of these buckets stored in the house in various places where they're not in the way, but most of them are in our sheds.  I try to put them near the ground on the north side of the shed, and cover them with old blankets to make sure they stay dark.  I don't like to set them right on the floor so I put a pallet in the shed and I set the buckets on that.  The air can then circulate under the buckets and help keep frost or condensation off of them.  I've never had moisture get inside one of these buckets, but it's still unnerving to go out on a winter morning and see frost on the outsides of the buckets. 

 

The storage life of all foods is lengthened by being kept cool and dark, in addition to removing or reducing the oxygen.  Wide swings in temperature are hard on foods, including grains and beans.  Daily swings are harder than seasonal swings, but to some extent we can't do anything about that.  I cover mine with several old blankets and then stack other things on or around the buckets.

 

It helps to have a master sheet of what you packed into buckets and when you did so.  It's constantly changing in our case, since we actively eat out of our buckets, so I keep my master list on the computer where changes and updates are easy to make.  But if my computer goes down I will lose my list, so I am planning to start printing it up a few times a year so I at least have a somewhat-recent copy of what we have stored in buckets.

 

Many stores with bakeries will give away or sell the buckets that frosting and other food comes in.  Check with stores near you.  Wal-Mart and other stores sell food-grade buckets, usually in bigger sizes such as 5-gallon. 

 

In addition to oxygen absorbers some people line their buckets with mylar bags to further extend the storage life. They usually come with oxygen absorbers as well.  These inside a bucket with a good seal can give you many years of storage life, often in excess of ten years.

 

Please leave comments or questions below or email them to:

povertyprepping@yahoo.com

 

Thanks! 

 

Susan

 

Dehydrating your own "Instant" food

 

 

 

A lot of people are familiar with "Minute Rice", which only takes 'a minute' to cook.  Minute rice is just pre-cooked rice that has been dehydrated.  They may use a freeze-dry process or they may just dehydrate it.  But it's easily made at home.

 

Have you ever left a plate on the counter with a few bits of rice on it, and the next morning it was hard and dry?  You've just made Minute rice by way of not doing your dishes before you went to bed!  Or those dried grains of rice on the inside of a pan...more Minute rice.

 

That's not the way I recommend you make it though.  I cook a pan of rice until it's nearly done, making sure it's not too chewy and hard, but not cooked into a clumped mass of almost-pudding.

 

Then I drain it if necessary and spread it on screens or dryer racks.  After a few hours of drying I use my fingers to stir up any clumps, and I might do that again a time or two, just to separate all the grains of rice.  I don't worry too much about small clumps when the rice is freshly cooked.  It's easy to break them up as they dry.  Any clump bigger than a large pea, I try to break up and spread out.  But even bigger clumps can be broke up a couple hours into the drying process.

 

Rice dries quickly.  Depending on how you're drying it, it can be as fast as a few hours or as long as overnight.  An electric dehydrator is the fastest.  I've dried rice on cookie sheets in the oven with the pilot light for heat, and on shelves above our woodstove.  If you live in an area with very low humidity it would dry just fine sitting on the kitchen counter.

 

Store the instant rice in an air-tight container, preferably glass or metal.  The cooler and darker you store it, the longer it will taste fresh when you use it.  It will always be safe to eat, but the flavor will eventually fade or flatten.

 

To cook the rice, use equal parts of water and rice.  I've put the rice right in the water at the start, and I've also waited until the water boiled before adding the rice, and I haven't noticed any difference.

 

 

 

I dried pinto beans so that I would have "instant" beans that I could use on short notice.  I usually Can dry beans for 'Instant" beans but I wanted something that didn't use up my canning jars.  In the winter when our woodstove is going to be hot anyway, I cook up pots of beans with the 'free' heat.  Some are still canned, but in the last few years I've started drying a lot of them.

 

Cook the beans until they are completely cooked and soft, but not falling apart into mush.  Then spread them on screens or racks to dry, just like the rice.  They dry a little slower than the rice but a lot faster than I expected.  Store in an airtight container.

 

To use the beans, soak in water for 15-minutes to half an hour.  Then use as you would freshly cooked beans.  At this point I often mash them and make refried beans, adding a bit of onion and garlic.  I also make bean soup by adding onion and chopped, cooked bacon.  Use them in whatever favorite recipes you have for beans.

 

This works with all dry beans, as well as with lentils and split peas.  It's a good way to have an assortment of ready-to-use beans, lentils, and split peas on hand, ready to use.

 

 

 

I tried an experiment with boxed macaroni and cheese.  I know it doesn't take long to make boxed macaroni and cheese, but I wanted something we could heat quickly while camping, and not use up much stove fuel. 

 

The first batch I did, I cooked the macaroni until it was done, drained it, and spread it to dry.  When I went to use the "instant macaroni and cheese", the macaroni turned to mush in the pan and stuck together in a huge clump. 

 

The second time, I cooked the noodles until they were somewhat soft but still chewable.   I drained and dried them, and then when I added them to boiling water, they finished cooking in about a minute.  I mixed the milk, butter, and cheese packet into the noodles, and the finished meal was undistinguishable from freshly-made macaroni and cheese.

 

I store the cheese powder packet in the jar with the noodles so they're handy to prepare.

 

Did I save anything by doing this?  Not really.  It still took fuel to cook the noodles, whether I pre-cooked and dried them, or just prepared them at the time the were to be eaten.  The only advantage I can see is for using it as camp food, or in a bug-out bag.  In a bug-out situation, if you even have a small stove of some sort, you'll definitely want to conserve fuel.  And if you have children and have to bug-out, it's a nice comfort food for them.  Be sure to include powdered milk and possibly powdered butter, and maybe some salt.  I haven't put this in my bug-out bag yet, but if I do, I'll mix the powdered milk, powdered butter, and salt in a small ziplock bag and put a rubber band around it and the jar, or use masking tape to attach it.

 

It could also be used during a time of power outage or any other interruption to your source of energy for cooking.  If you don't have a back-up way to heat food, it's a good time to do research on it.  There are old posts near the beginning of this blog with some good ideas.

 

 

Please leave comments and questions below, or by email at povertyprepping@yahoo.com

 

 

Thank you!

Susan and the Poverty Prepping team.