Tag Archives: storage food

Food storage…literally

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Ok, here’s the scenario to imagine: its the dead of winter and, for whatever reason, you’ve been forced to head to your fallback location. Really, all you could take with you was whats on your back and not much else. Being the harshest part of winter, its a bit of a slog but you make it to your destination. You let yourself into your cabin (or whatever) and you’re wet, cold, and hungry after the stress-filled challenge of getting there. You grab a propane bottle off the shelf and get your buddy heater going so you can sit in front of it and get some immediate warmth while you wait for the fire in the woodstove to start warming the place up. You drag a plastic bin out from under the bunk and change your wet pants and socks for dry. So far so good. But..still hungry. This little haven has been empty for the last three months, so there’s been no heat. Whatever food you have in place is going to have to be something that can withstand freeze/thaw cycles without becoming inedible or simply exploding its packaging. So with that in mind, here’s my question for the collective hive-mind: If you were going to store foods in a location that was going to be subject to freeze/thaw cycles, what foods would be best choices? Obviously anything that is liquid is probably not gonna fly since jars will freeze and burst. Also, some foods simply do not handle being repeatedly frozen and thawed. To my way of thinking this means that youre restricted to things that are dry and have no liquid or semi-liquids to worry about….soup mixes, instant potatoes, freeze dried foods, rice, beans, etc, etc. Canned goods are probably off the list since they run the risk of the cans bursting from the cold, and the wet contents may not remain palatable through the freeze/thaw cycles.

No doubt someone will opine that the end-run around this is to have some sort of heat system in place that will run while the cabin’s owner is absent. A large propane tank and a thermostat, or some such setup. Thats not in the cards…while mechanically it is do-able, thats kind of putting a lot of eggs into a basket that may, at the worst time, simply fail.

And, also, keep in mind I am not asking about the quantity of food. Thats not really relevant here, Im asking what actual foods would be indifferent to storage in an environment where there is nothing standing between them and freezing.

Thus far, I’ve come up with dried pasta, rice, beans, hash browns, drink mixes (iced tea, Gatorade, Tang, etc.), egg mix, pancake mix, salt, sugar, most spices, hard candy, oatmeal, cornmeal,canned bread,  mac-n-cheese, and a few others. MRE’s and freeze drieds are certainly an option and are part of the overall answer, but what else?

Video – I ate Survival Food Rations for 30 Days – Here’s What Happened

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I very much like when someone actually real-world tests a piece of gear or a system and goes all Mythbusters on it. Whats it like to live 30 days on one of those 30 day emergency food kits? Well, this guy did it and documented the results. And, yes, the digestive results were as bad as you might have guessed.

This video is really quite informative and I highly suggest watching. Skip it to 1.5x speed if youre in a hurry. The short version is that appetite fatigue is real, even at 2000 calories a day he lost eight pounds, and you’re going to use a lot more water than you might think. In the spirit of good science, he also documented the time, fuel, and water consumption involved in the cooking and cleaning process as well. Excellent material.

Most of us, in a crisis, wouldn’t, I think, be living exclusively on pouch survival food. We’d supplement it with offthe-shelf everyday foods that have fairly good shelf life…canned meats,canned fruit, jarred sauces, etc. BUT….those don’t have thirty year shelf life.

Youre mileage may vary, of course, but this video, in my opinion, is very much worth watching. Watch it, and then think how you’d adjust your long-term food storage inventory appropriately to make your experience better than his.

Bumping a link – Safely Gathered In

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I was re-reading some of my earlier posts about canned food and storage food. While we can all agree that pre-packaged food is often not the healthiest thing for you to eat, I think that we can also agree that when you haven’t eaten if three day you’re probably gong to be a little more forgiving of some MSG or high fructose corn syrup in whatever it is you’ve stumbled across to eat.

Making anything ‘from scratch’ using long-life, shelf-stable food is challenging. Yes, you can open a jar of spaghetti sauce, crack open a can of ground beef, and pull some spaghetti out of a box. Presto – dinner is served. But for anything more complex than that, with more than three or four ingredients, you really have to do some careful menu planning.

This website has been one of my favorites since I found it. It is dormant and hasn’t been updated in years, but theres a pretty lengthy list of recipes, with pictures, for all sortsa meal using genuine long-term, shelf-stable stuff. I highly recommend viewing it: Safely Gathered In . And, yup, its from the LDS/Mormons…naturally. I’mm posting about it because although I’ve mentioned it in the past, there’s always a bunch of recent readers who may not have been around when I last linked to it.

I’ve long thought there needs to be some genuine ‘cooking with storage/stored food’ cookbook. Something that wasn’t just theory, but something with actual hands-on cooking, lotsa photos, and solid metrics about quantities, calories, and fuel consumption. I’ve read a few books that tried to be that, and I thought they failed miserably. Mostly because at some point in the recipe, a fresh ingredient was called for. No, I think a cookbook for using nothing but literal sits-on-a-shelf ingredients would fill a void in the preparedness marketplace. It wouldnt make anone rich, but it’d be nice to have.

Mountain House math at CostCo

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“Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

Was up at CostCo and beheld this:

Five Day Meal Kit, eh? Hmmm. Lets run some numbers. First, lets grab the data off the back of the box:

So, this is supposed to be five days of food for …I’m guessing one person. Without evidence contrary to that, let’s run with it – five days for one person.

According to the box label, you’ve got a total of fifteen pouches in there. Makes sense, right? Three meals a day for five days is fifteen meals.

The next thing of interest is the caloric value of each meal. This is going to be a tad misleading. Lets take the first item listed on the box…Beef Lasagna. The box says 220 calories. Thats about 1/10th of your daily recommended calories (if you follow USDA guidelines of 2000/k per day). But keep reading…each container is two servings. So, each pouch of that Beef Lasagna is actually 440 calories, or about 1/5th of your daily calories. Slightly better.

So keeping an eye on those calories-per-serving and servings-per-container, you can see that if you add up the entire caloric value of this box you get…an average of 1488 calories per day. Thats about 75% of your daily 2000 calories. And thats 2000 calories for just sitting there doing nothing. Factor in chainsawing downed trees, hanging looters, hauling supplies, etc, etc, and you’ll see that 1488 calories is better than nothing but you better plan on adding a few notches to your belt.

Does that mean that a package like this has no value? Heck, no. I’l take 1488 calories of freezedrieds stored in a 5-gallon-bucket in the back of my truck over the 2500 calories of food that got destroyed/looted/washed away/burned in my house. Something is, usually, better than nothing.

Now, if you took this box, dumped out the pouches and sealed ’em up in a five gallon bucket with some pouches of tuna, packets of oatmeal, instant coffee packets, Gatorade pouches, and maybe a few small cans of Dinty Moore….well…you’re sitting pretty when the dinner bell rings in Heleneville.

The takeaway from this post isn’t that freeze-drieds arent the Perfect Solution. You should already know that. The takeaway here is that you need to read the labels and do the math. Don’t plop down $320 for four of these, stick ’em in a closet, and pat yourself on the back thinnking you, the wife, and kids are now ‘taken care of’.

Two thousand calories per day is a baseline. And there are a lot of people who think that number is of questionable value. Only you know what kinda caloric stockpile will work for you. Run the numbers. Being prepared is sometimes a pain in the butt, but do it anyway. We can all probably stand to miss a few meals and wind up being the better for it, but in a crisis there is very little that calms you down and gets your brain on an even keel more than a tasty hot meal at regular intervals.

So, yeah, pick up some of these at CostCo…at $6 per pouch its not a terrible value. But don’t think youre done once you throw that box in your cart.

Augason Farms Cheese Powder

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As I mentioned earlier, the local WinCo had restocked on Augason Farms food storage. One of the things that was there that I had not seen previously was the cheese sauce. Off the top of my head, the thing that would benefit mostly from this would be the simple meal of macaroni-and-cheese.

The LDS cannery people offer #10 cans full of elbow macaroni, and that stuff keeps quite a while. A case of that, a can of this cheese blend, and you can feed a lot of people without too much fuss. Nutritional value? Probably sketchy. But macaroni-and-cheese will fill up the entire church basement full of refugees without too much fuss. Bonus is that the kids are probably already used to it. Its a no muss, no fuss meal.

So…lets crank a can open and see what we have:

A can of … orange powder. What a shock. Theres a lot in there. There’s also a handful of oxy absorbers hidden in there too. I’m guessing this stuff is pretty hygroscopic, so get what you need and then seal that can back up. The can says to use a 2:1 ratio of water:mix. I followed the instructions and did exactly that.

The instructions say to bring the water to a boil and whisk in the mix, stirring for a couple minutes until it thickens. The thickening part seemed to take a while. My suggestion would be to use some of the starch-loaded pasta water to help thicken this stuff. I guess we better make some elbow macaroni to go with this.

Elbow macaroni is kind of a staple in many storage food pantries. Any interesting shaped pasta should work for this purpose…shells, penne, ziti, orrecchiette, orzo, etc. So, cook up some elbow macaroni until it is al dente, drain, and mix with sauce.

And…thumbs up. It was pretty good. It did need to be a bit thicker but thats easy enough to do. I might throw in a little butter, and perhaps use milk instead of water next time. But, overall…….good product. A little goes a long way, by the way.

Definitely good for mac and cheese. Theres a recipe on the can for making a queso dip. Im told that sprinkling this on popcorn would have some appeal as well. For me, it seems like an excellent choice for feeding a buncha people in a hurry with something everyone will like and that doesn’t require a lot of effort. So, yeah…I’ll pick up a couple cans this weekend and tuck ’em away with the LDS cans of elbow mac.

Go. Buy with confidence.

WinCo is at it again

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The cheese powder is new…might have to get some to try out for post-apocalyptic mac-n-cheese. Not the price on freeze dried strawberries….$3 per ounce, or $48 per pound. Let me crunch some numbers while you go  look at these pictures…..


Strawberries appear to be $3.49/#, or .22/ounce locally. Quick Googling shows that freeze drying strawberries reduces their weight (not volume) by about 88%. So, to get one ounce of freeze dried strawberries you need to start with about 8.33 ounces..or, in other words, a ratio of 8.33:1.

If strawberries are $3.49/#, then 8.33 ounces (52% of a pound) of strawberries would cost $1.81.

So, the can of Augason FD sstrawberries, at 6.4 ounces, contains 3.33 pounds of strawberries before FD processing.

Augason is $3.00/oz for FD strawberries. You can make them yourself for $1.81/oz. You would save $1.19 per oz. At $1600 you would need to make 884 ounces (55#) of FD strawberries for the machine to pay for itself. That would be the equivalent of 138 cans of strawberries.

Obviously the margins, and therefore the returns, on more expensive things like meat would result in ‘paying off’ the purchase of the machine faster.

Something to think about.

Plastic container prep

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A few posts back I mentioned that I had bought a new bunch of Scepter water cans.

Any new plastic container is going to have ‘that plastic smell’. Also, you don’t know where that container has been or what its been exposed to in its time at the warehouse. So, the smart survivalist will clean these things out if for no other reason than to at least get rid of that unappealing strong plastic smell.

Ten bucks up at CostCo gets you about 14# of baking soda. You don’t need 14# of baking soda to wash out a water jug, but more is better, right? I err on the side of overkill, so I fill a gallon pitcher with hot water, dump in about a cup of baking soda, stir well and dump it into the water jug. Seal it up loosely so water can escape a bit and get the threads of the cap. Shake vigorously, shake some more, and then finally shake it vigorously.  I give it about 30 seconds of violent shaking so I can feel the water hitting all the sides of the jug. Don’t be gentle.

Now, if you’re just doing one jug, you can dump out the mix and then rinse the thing out thoroughly with cold water from a hose. But, since I’m doing more than one, I’ll dump the mix into the next jug and repeat the process. I’ll do this for two or three jugs and then use some fresh baking soda/water mix.

Keep in mind, when you dump the water/soda mix out of the jug it will leave traces of baking soda on the inside that will eventually dry to a powdery film. This is why the rinse with clear cold water afterwards.

By this method I either totally eliminate the plastic smell, or reduce it to virtually nothing. And, of course, I’ve now cleaned out the inside of the jug. If you’re a suspenders-and-a-belt guy you may want to disinfect or sterilize the jug afterwards. Thats pretty much the same process but using water/bleach instead of water/baking soda.

And, finally, when it’s time to fill these things you can add all sortsa ‘water preservers’ or bleach to promote storage life. Its my understanding that municipal water (“city water”) is fine to store right out of the tap since it has already been treated by the municipal water provider.

I should also point out that I do this for any large plastic container that I am storing something edible in. My buckets for rice, wheat, etc., also get this treatment. In that case it is imperative that you make sure the bucket is completely bone dry before you fill it with your food product. After cleaning I usually let the bucket/container sit in a dry place indoors for a few days to completely dry out.

Can I get away with not doing any of that and just fill the things up without going through that effort? Absolutely. But this is stuff you’re putting away for a rather dire circumstance. When that dire circumstance occurs (or is occurring) aren’t you going to want every confidence and advantage possible? Of course you will…so spend the ten minutes and do the work. Future you will thank you.

 

Augason Vegetable Stew Mix

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WinCo has restocked on the Augason Farms products.

I’m pretty well set on these products, but since it’s available and I’m always up for experimentation….lets crack one open and see what we get.

What you see in the picture above is two heaping tablespoons of this dehydrated vegetable mix. Its a bit heavy on the potatoes, but there’s a pretty fair representation of everything else in there as well. So, how to rehydrate? Well, let’s just go with the basic of using warm water and time.

I put in enough warm water to cover, and left to go to work.

After a little while, t hings start plumping up.

And when I returned to the house at the end of the day, this is what I saw.

Drained the remaining liquid and this is what remains. The thing that surprised me was just how small these things were cut. When Ii think stew, I think of reasonably hearty chunks of vegetables. Not here. No piece is larger than a thumbnail. This isn’t necessarily bad, it just means you should be aware of it.

I’m going to try mixing this up with a can of beef stock, some Keystone beef, and a few other dry ingredients and see what kind of beef soup or beef stew can be created out of entirely long-term foods. I’ll let you know how it works out.