Adventures in food shelf-life

When it comes to storage-type food, you very often trade flavor for shelf life. You can have a product that tastes really good, but only lasts a minimum amount of time…or you can have a product with a great shelf life but its flavor is such that you would only eat it after the fallout settles and the Kroger’s is a smoking ruin.

Years ago (eight years, actually) I bought a bunch of the Idahoan instant potatoes in pouches. I recommend these highly, and find them to be very good. So good, in fact, that when I’m feeling too lazy to peel, boil, and mash ‘real’ spuds I reach for these. For the price of two of these pouches I can buy a 5# bag of potatoes at my local supermarket, so economically it may not make a lot of sense to have them all the time, but for storage food….very highly recommend.

One concern I had was the durability of the paper pouches. Its heavy duty paper, to be sure…but how will it hold up over time? Funny you should ask….

13890According to Idahoans website FAQ, this particualr pouch o’ spuds was born almost eight years ago. I’d bought a bunch of these when they were on sale and stuffed ’em into a plastic tub, sealed it up, and sat it on the shelf with all the other mid-term food storage in the classic ‘cool,dry place’. But…after a few years, I was pretty certain theyd have gone stale or bad or whatever happens to dehydrated potatoes. In fact, while I wasnt sure enough to pull them off the shelf and discard them, I was sure enough to pull them off my inventory spreadsheet.

Well, to make a long story short, it appears that even in the simple heavy paper pouch, stored under good conditions, they actually held up quite well for eight years. No discernible loss of flavor or texture. In fact, they seemed just fine. So, despite theyre not being packaged in a long-term manner from the factory, if you just stuff the pouches into a hard container, seal it up, and store it under the usual conditions…it lasts just fine.

So…if you’re looking to ads something to the ol’ pantry that tastes good enough to eat on a regular basis, but has a shelf life that goes on for quite a while…..these come highly recommended.

 

Article – 6 Instant Meals-On-The-Go – Just Add Boiling Water

I rather liked this article.

MRE’s have a place in the world of portable food, but while theyre okay they aren’t the tastiest rations in the world. They’re a really good option for when you want something that you can just eat right away with minimal prep, but they’re heavy and bulky. Freeze drieds are awesome but they tend to be expensive.

The link in the first ‘graf goes to a DIY article on making your own freeze dried meals utilizing freeze dried foods that you can find at (usually) your local market.

The selection of freeze dried meals available these days is actually pretty good, but it’s nice to have the option to make your own to get exactly what you want.

CostCo canned pulled pork

I’ve mentioned the Costco/Kirkland canned roast beef before. It’s really good stuff and although food preferences are subjective, I recommend the stuff highly. Last time i went to buy some at CostCo they no longer had it and I was told it was only available through the website. Bummer. But, apparently, it’s back on the shelf at my particular CostCo. As I was picking some up, I noticed that they also had cans of pulled pork. The thing that really caught my eye was that the pulled pork was quite a bit cheaper than the beef. Well, for my end-of-the-world planning, protein is protein. So lets pick up a roll of four 12 oz. cans for $6.99 which comes out to…uhm.. lets see….$2.33/#, which is actually pretty good.

20150906_130743I figured I’d try one of the recipes on the can and see how it turns out. In this particular case, a form of chili. Now, lets get this part out of the way – I’m from the school of thought that says chili doesn’t have beans. I’m not going to argue it with you, I’m just puttin’ it out there. Moving on, now.

  • 1 can of pulled pork
  • 1 diced green pepper
  • 1 diced onion
  • 1 small can of chiles
  • 1 can of diced tomatoes

And we’ll toss that in the cast iron, cover it, and simmer it for an hour to give everything time to mix.

Turns out, it was actually pretty good. The pork isn’t really ‘pulled’ as we recognize it from, say, a good BBQ joint. It’s more ‘flaked’, like tuna fish. But, even though like all meats it smelled like cat food when the can was opened, it was good.  For the price, this is an excellent product to have on the shelf…cheaper than the roast beef and quite useful in a variety of dishes.

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Hey! Paratus is this coming Friday! Tell your friends!

Canned stuff musings

Another glorious day here in paradise. My local Albertson’s is having a sale on canned goods and I picked up a couple of flats of canned tomatoes and corn. Funny thing is, I had just gone to CostCo earlier in the week and bought some canned tomatoes…and they were more expensive than this sale. So the moral of the story is – you can’t always assume the warehouse store will be cheaper. Now, arguably, they’re not the same product….CostCo’s offering was ‘organic diced tomatoes’ and we all know ‘oganic’ means virtually nothing except a higher price. (And the only reason I picked them up was because CostCo didnt have any other kind of canned diced tomatoes.)

Speaking of CostCo, after a hiatus of a few months they appear to have the canned  Kirkland Roast Beef back in stock. Normally, I turn my nose up at canned meats….they all look and smell like cat food once the can opener punctures the can…but the Kirkland roast beef, once you toss it in a pan for a few minutes, turns out to be darn good. So, why wouldn’t I grab a few of them to put on the shelf?

When it comes to storing all this canned stuff, I usually go with steel wire shelving (also available at CostCo).

IMG_0520

I tlooks good, handles the weight, and is configurable to allow me to have it follow walls and corners. Yeah, it runs about $100 for a six-shelf unit, but pick up a bag of S-hooks and you increase the versatility and get better value out of your existing sets of shelves.

I like these little can organizers from Shelf Reliance. They’re plastic and link/stack together so you can just run ’em along the length of shelving. If you’re truly hardcore, or have a huge enough family that #10 cans a re a mainstay, they also make a similar product for #10 cans. Thats when you konw you’ve arrived.

Of course, any goober with some plywood, a saw, and a screwgun can fab up a similar product on his won but I’m kinda lazy and rather enjoy the consumer experience…so I just buy this sort of stuff.

The sale at Albertsons is for another few days so I’ll see if I can scrape up another few bucks to get some more flats. I’m very painfully aware that food I buy now may someday be all thats standing between me and being hungry.

Back into the breach with MH

Much like the slapped-around trailerpark housewife who goes back to her drunk, abusive husband I have renewed my dealer account with Mountain House.

Years ago I got dealer status with them to punch up my food storage. The plan was simple – sell enough of their product that it would finance my own acquisition of that product. It actually worked pretty well. But then…MH came home drunk one night and things got dark.

More specifically, there was a period a few years back where MH stopped selling to small-time dealers. The thing that was especiialy hard to find were the #10 cans. There were all sorts of rumours swirling about trying to come up with a reason for MH freezing out its small-time dealers. The most popular rumour was that MH had gotten some big .gov contract and was purposing as much of their production as possible towards filling those contracts….thereby leaving the little guys out in the cold.

MH denied the .gov contract angle, but then again wouldn’t the terms of any .gov contract require them to keep hush-hush about it anyway? So for a year or so MH was in high demand in the preparedness community and in low supply. Eventually, MH started shipping again and things resumed an even keel….except with me. I was kinda annoyed with MH for their actions.

A year or so goes by and, lo and behold, I discovered this.  (Here’s the complete post.) By that point I had a pretty good amount of MH on the shelf and was branching out in the much broader variety of Augason Farms.  I figured my needs with MH had been met, so I didn’t take any steps to keep my dealer account active with them. Then, the other day, I was up at REI and I was perusing the camping food section (because….why not?) and I saw some new things. Specifically, these. The Italian Pepper Steak, especialy, caught my attention.

So I called the guys (gals, actually) at MH and asked if my account with them was still valid and could be brought up-to-date. (See, MH really tightened up their dealer policy a while back and getting dealer status with them nowadays is a bit trickier.) They said they could do that and, by the way, we’ll send you some samples of those new products.

And then FedEx came by today.

20150612_130949

Yay for free samples! Maybe..maybe he’s really sorry this time! Maybe I’m being to hard on him…maybe….

We shall see. In the meantime, I’ll be getting together with my local cadre of like-minded individuals and see if we can’t all pool our resources and needs to put in one big group buy.

Canned water

It’s kind of interesting to look back on the history prepping back to the golden-age of the Red Scare and Cuban Missile Crisis and seeing the gear that was marketed towards those wanting to survive the inevitable nukefest.

cw-1One of the things that I often see pictures of in old bomb shelters is canned water. More specifically, drinking water that was packaged in cans like beer or other canned food would be. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. Notice that this was in the days of dinosaurs before the pull-top can was invented. So, if you wanted to slake your thirst in the post-nuke world, you needed the old-fashioned church key to open it. Although there are plenty of these relics floating around, and people come across them from time to time and post pictures of them on the internet, very infrequently do you find those same people saying if the cans were still full or not. Assuming the cans were not lined with any particular barrier coating (which seems pretty likely considering the era), and their steel construction,  the cans probably succumbed to rusting pretty quickly. (This, by the way, is why those old Civil Defense water barrels were not stored full of water,  but rather stored in such a condition as to allow them to be rapidly filled when the warnings were given.)

Water_sideFrom a manufacturing standpoint, the market for this sort of thing would have been a no-brainer for a company that was already involved in the bottling/canning process. For example, here’s some canned water that was canned by the folks at Royal Crown, or as we know it today – RC Cola. If you’ve already got the canning operation set up to make pop, why not just turn the taps on and can some water at the same time? No additional capital investment and a whole new market to sell to….seems like a win to me. But, realistically, that market for canned water, even at the peak of the crisis, probably couldn’t even begin to compare to the market for the regular product.

Anheuser-Busch-Water-Cans-in-Packaging-1 Interestingly, canned water actually does turn up these days in disasters. The folks at Anheuser-Busch, most famous for Budweiser beer, periodically use their resources to run off batches of canned water to be distributed in disaster areas. Compared to the old cans, these things are rocketships…pull-top cans so no opener is required, lined interiors to preserve taste, and aluminum construction to reduce weight and increase durability. And, considering the manufacturing technology and resources of a company like A-B, they probably produce more of these things in an 8-hour shift than most companies could have produced in a week back in the days of Sputnik.

51BhAMJrHnL._SX425_Interestingly, if a person was interested in getting some of this sort of thing for their own bunker you can find it online without having to hang around a disaster relief tent. There’s at least one vendor on Amazon selling the stuff. (Blue Can) And although I rather like the idea of the convenience and durability of an aluminum can, I think that, when you really think about it, any advantages offered by an aluminum can are pretty much available in other forms…most specifically the ubiquitous plastic water bottle that we get at WalMart for around $5 a case. (Versus what amounts to about a buck a can for the aluminum cased stuff.)

I can’t speak for everyone, but my own experience has been that the plastic water bottles are exceptionally durable and probably more durable than the aluminum cans. The biggest issue that springs to mind is what happens in cold weather…I’ve had cans of Coke freeze and explode like an M67, but I’ve never had one of the plastic bottles explode. The bottles also have a bit of ‘give’ to them so things that might puncture an aluminum can don’t necessarily have the same effect on the plastic bottle. In fact, pretty much the only advantage I can come up with for the can over the plastic bottle is the opaque nature of the can preventing light transmission and inhibiting any type of growths.

thTwo other packaging options are the ‘juice box’ style of packaging, which is also pretty tough to find, and the foil pouches that we often see marketed specifically towards preparedness. The boxes seem like a clever idea but I think theyre the least durable and therefore the least attractive option. I do very much like the foil pouches. While I don’t think they have the puncture resistance of the plastic bottles, I very much like their small serving size…their small size means that if they freeze (like in your car in the winter) you can thaw them quickly and easily by just tucking them under your arm or sitting on them. Contrast that with trying to quick-thaw a 16 oz. frozen plastic bottle of water.

It’s also worth pointing out that if you’re the DIY type of guy you can actually ‘can’ water same as you’d can fruits or other foods using your pressure cooker. The water is completely sterilized, the containers are sterilized, and pretty much the only weak point is the glass container.

Article – School serves 6-year-old meat to TN students

ROGERSVILLE, Tenn. – Meat dating to the year of President Obama’s first inauguration was served to students in some Hawkins County, Tennessee schools last week.

Hawkins County Commissioner Michael Herrell was alerted after a cafeteria worker sent him a photo of the pork roast they used for school meals was from 2009.

The 6-year-old meat had been frozen and then was thawed for meal preparation, according to WCYB.

Herrell said the photo was taken at Joseph Rogers Primary School where the staff decided not to serve the meat. However, it was served at other schools.

Eating 6-year-old meat is not a big deal if it was stored properly. We routinely eat meat thats been sitting in the deep freeze for a year or two, and the oldest I’ve pulled out and consumed has been around five years old. As long as you packaged it well and kept it frozen, it’s usually just fine. There may be some spots of freezer burn if you didn’t get all the air out of the package, but those don’t affect the nutritional value or the safety of the food.

As an aside, if you’re really upset about the quality of the slop slapped onto your kids lunch tray, either pack ’em a lunch or give ’em five bucks to go get a slice of pizza and a Coke. It’s not .gov’s responsibility to feed your kid. Public government schools already do a crappy job of educating your kid, why would you think they’d do any better job of feeding them?

Canned meats

Canned meats are something that, no matter how objective I try to be, always elicit a shudder and a mental “Ewwww”. I mean, just about every form of canned meat, when opened, whether it is Spam, chicken, beef, hash, whatever, smells and looks like cat food.

It was only with great trepidation and great surprise that I was willing to try the CostCo canned roast beef and discover that, once you fry it up, it’s really quite good. In fact, it was so good we have added it as a regular inventory item to our spreadsheet of stored food.

Up until now, most canned meats are pretty basic: canned chicken, canned pork, canned salmon, etc. But things are starting to get a little more ‘niche’. An example was this that I found in WalMart:

Canned beef fajita strips and canned meatballs. Part of me was quite curious about this stuff and another part of me was slightly nauseous contemplating how badly these things could turn out. Yes, I was a coward and took a pass on these…mostly on the strength of WalMart being known for ‘low prices’ and me not wanting to know where the corners were cut on these cuts of meat. BUT…it is interesting to to think that with some stored pasta, a jar of spaghetti sauce, and a couple cans of meatballs, you could have a hearty comfort-food meal with a shelf life measured by election cycles.

Interesting the things you see when you start mindlessly examining everything on the ‘canned meats’ shelf at WallyWorld.

50% off One Month Pack from Augason Farms

Augason Farms is having a 50% off sale on their “One Month Pack”. (No idea how long the sale is running.) I bought a couple of these a while back and it is an excellent way to get introduced to their product. Foods are in #2 cans, which are far more practical than #10 cans, and when you factor in the price ($128.50 / 48 cans) you wind up getting a great assortment of stuff to try for, on average, $2.68. Nice fire-n-forget package for tucking away in cabins, RV’s, bunkers, caches, and relative’s houses. They also make great gifts if you’re the kinda guy who is willing to spend that kinda money on other folks.

My experience has been that when they have these sales it may take a week or two for product to ship, but to me it’s worth any delay to save a hundred bucks.

Since my food prep needs are small, two people, I find the #2 can (Augason Farms calls it their ‘Everyday Size’) to be a more practical size than a #10 can. A #10 can is a lot of food and if you don’t consume it fast enough you wind up wasting it. The #2 cans are just about the right size for one or two people.

I wound up buying a few other #2 cans of product to ’round out’ the ‘One Month Pack’ more to my liking. In conjunction with some canned/freezedried meats you can put together a pretty nice menu.

Anyway, they sent me a notice in email about the sale and I’m passing it along.