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<\/a>An eight year old pound of spaghetti purchased from Costco. Storage conditions? Put into a plastic tub with a lid and sat on a wire shelf in my basement for the last eight years. Results?<\/p>\nAbsolutely fine. Cooked up just as you would expect.<\/p>\n
I’m not surprised. There are foods that you need to very deliberately and carefully package away for storage and there are some that are just….bulletproof. My experience has been that pasta, kept dry and vermin-free, keeps pretty much indefinitely. In this case, I just proved it’ll last at least eight years.<\/p>\n
Another food that requires, basically, zero babying is rice. I kid you not, I had a 15-gallon blue barrel full of rice from my Y2k stash and ten years later it was just fine with the only attention in its packaging having been to pour it into the barrel and screw on the lid. I would bet you that rice poured into a clean jar with a tight fitting lid would last virtually forever.<\/p>\n
Does that mean these are the optimal<\/em> ways to store these particular items? Heck no. But what it does mean is that you can sock away pounds and pounds of a staple food that goes a long way towards helping to stretch out your other foods and do it without a lot of effort.<\/p>\n My experience, and your mileage may vary, is that in my climate and in my house I can take these plastic sealed packages of pasta, stuff ’em into a plastic tub with a tight fitting lid, tuck them away on a shelf in a cool dark place, and it stores just fine.<\/p>\n I suppose if you live in the south or some other equally humid environment its a different story, same if youre in an environment that is known for creepy crawly things, but where I live it’s practically a high-altitude desert.<\/p>\n The point, if there is one, is that some foods just lend themselves to longish storage periods without a lot of fancy prep and packaging.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Well, let’s pull some stored-for-a-while food off the shelf and see what happens: An eight year old pound of spaghetti purchased from Costco. Storage conditions? Put into a plastic tub with a lid and sat on a wire shelf in … Continue reading