Food Storage: How to Store Wheat So It Is Still Delicious 31 Years Later

are you afraid of storing wheat you just might be missing out on some really great stuff hi i'm jonathan and i'm kaileen and we are the provident preppers these are wheat berries and they should be a part of your long-term food storage the only exception is if you have wheat allergies or are gluten intolerant then you don't need to store this but for the rest of us for the rest of us this is gold this is something that you can make bread you can make cakes brownies muffins all kinds of great things if you have the wheat yeah and if you don't have it in your food storage then you are so limited in what you can make um this is white wheat and it is by far my favorite is hard white wheat however i don't care which one it is this is red wheat and it's really good too and everybody has their preferences some people prefer the red some the white whatever it is make sure you have it yeah this red is really good for artisan type of breads and heavy kind of heavier breads um the white is really good for a milder flavor and lighter breads so now today we're going to talk about how to package wheat for storage kind of which you should buy and what you can do to extend the shelf life of wheat so that it will last as long as it possibly can in good condition now we're also going to show you how to make our favorite whole wheat bread so stay tuned it's going to be good the container that you package your wheat in can make all the difference in the shelf life for instance there they sell wheat in 25 pound bags that are just in plastic bags and those are only good for about 18 months because the oxygen in the air will travel through that plastic and affect the wheat so we want to make sure that we package it correctly if you package your wheat in a number 10 can then you've got it about a 30-year shelf life depending on how you store it always you've got a cool dry dark right if you store this in an arizona garage it's only going to last a few years you've got to store it in a cool place but a number 10 pen creates the ideal environment for storing wheat long term your next best bet is actually a plastic bucket that is lined with a mylar bag because that will provide a true oxygen barrier the plastic bucket oxygen will permeate through it over time and so it's good we do a lot like this is ours it was packaged in 1999 um and it's still good right that's been 20 years 22 years right 1999 22 years um so that's still good what we do is most of the time we have this bucket that sits in the bottom of my pantry and this is full of wheat and we take a bucket or these cans or whatever we're wanting to rotate and we dump it in here and we use it from our kitchen pantry we already talked a little bit about mylar bags these are a great way to store grains but you need to remember that they are not rodent proof so to help protect them you probably want to put them in a bucket or a tote metal garbage can whatever you can do to keep the rodents out but this will provide a 20 to 25 year shelf life good stuff and you can package this at home that's a great inexpensive option yeah very very much so but an even less expensive option is to repurpose plastic pete bottles you want to look for the number one symbol on the bottom and it says p-e-t or p-e-t-e um and you can use that to package your food storage and then it doesn't cost any more other than a lot of labor there is a video if you want to click the card in the corner we describe exactly how to do this this week was packaged in 2008 and it's still perfectly good another option is to package it in glass jars there are two downsides to glass jars one is that it's fragile the other is that the light will penetrate and you have some issues with that here depending on which kind of peat bottles you're using um so you need to make sure that if there's an earthquake you're not going to lose all your wheat supply and you need to protect this from light but this mason jar will provide the same level of protection as the can does as far as creating this wonderful little time capsule where the wheat is nice and safe so when you're thinking about your container it has to fit in your budget it's better to store something less than perfect than it is not to store anything at all and in our family wheat is probably the number one thing that we have in our food supply let's talk just for a moment about treatment methods what we're treating for is pests and insects that could be in your grain and could just ruin your supply now one of your options is not to treat and that is an option that you can choose we don't recommend it however because there is a high risk that you could have a problem but you hear people say all the time it just adds a little bit more protein to my wheat there we go i don't want any of that kind of protein in my wheat one of the methods we really like are the oxygen absorbers these take out the oxygen which preserves the product better so because it doesn't oxidize and also it takes care of any bugs that will be in there they can't live in a no oxygen environment so these are great some people think that they won't be able to sprout their weed if they use these but our experimentation has told us otherwise yeah so if you click the card in the corner it will take you to a post that we created where we took all kinds of different um containers of ages of wheat and different types of um treatment and we tested them right we actually tried to sprout them and it was really surprising to us what sprouted and what didn't but the thing that we did learn is that oxygen absorbers don't inhibit the wheat from sprouting and we've got the photo proof so make sure you check that out absolutely some other methods that you can use are um dry ice method that's a good one um and again we have information on our site to help you get there and actually with the dry ice so the plastic buckets that is the preferred method for that because oxygen absorbers actually kind of create a vacuum where they pull in from the outside and the oxygen will permeate the the walls of the container but the um carbon dioxide doesn't do that that's right and so it's the right way to use um or to treat for a plastic bucket unless you're using a mylar bag sorry unless you're using my bag because the mylar bags are perfect for oxygen absorbers absolutely also you can use vacuum sealers so that is one other option that you can look at yeah and the vacuum seal um what is kind of like the oxygen absorbers with the bugs it just creates an environment where they can't survive so that works um this is diatomaceous earth and some people like to use it i personally do not be careful if you use it there are a couple different kinds one is safe to eat the other is used for pools and things like that and it's toxic so make sure you get the right kind to begin with it's a super fine powder um but it's has little shards it's from little sea creatures and when the bugs eat it it causes internal bleeding and kills them so there's a couple of things that i don't like about it one is that i don't want any of this mixed in my food it's totally safe for me to eat um i don't want to eat it though i just don't want to um and the adult or the bugs have to grow up to be able to have this work so then i've got dead bugs in there which you know better dead than alive but that is not something that i want to do one of the other things you can do is something called the freeze thaw freeze method and you need to make sure you have a moisture proof container so if i were storing this again right now and i filled it up with wheat i could take this and put it in the freezer for two to three days then i want to take it out and put it on the counter for it one day and let it return to room temperature and what that does is it tells the eggs that were in there because the freezing killed the adults but the eggs the freezing won't kill that's how they overwinter right so you tell when this is thawing you tell those eggs that it's springtime and it's time for them to hatch and then you return to this to the freezer for two to three days and it will kill the eggs that have hatched um and so that's the freeze throttle freeze method sometimes if you have an infestation in here it will take more times than just that but normally if you're looking at good clean grain that's fine and you can do this in up to a 15 pound container anything bigger than that it really doesn't work well in your freezer but make sure that it's a moisture proof container because you do not want moisture getting into your food supply so that's you know if you don't have a lot of money putting it your wheat in a peat bottle and using the freeze thaw freeze method doesn't cost anything extra out of your pocket so there's kind of like no excuses not to get this done um a couple things that you should not do it's not recommended according to the usu extension you should not or they do not recommend heat treatment because it's not really effective you never want to use insecticides and some people will tell you to go to the local farm store and buy seed wheat because it's already treated with pesticides don't do that i just just don't do that um also things like bay leaves that's an old wives tale it really doesn't work in fact we talked to one of our viewers who said yeah it doesn't work he had barrels of wheat that he had inherited and when he opened them up they were layered with a lot of bay leaves and infested with bugs so you know don't just don't do that um nails is another thing that they say doesn't work and um salt don't do those so really if you just stick to the tried and true methods you will be better off because i'm putting this away for an emergency for my family to make sure that we're safe last thing i want to do is have some kind of crisis where we're depending on this for our survival and it's infested with bugs we'd probably eat it right but wouldn't it be nicer if it wasn't let's just do it right yeah let's just do it right we love it when people gift us food storage because it allows us to be able to experiment and discover what's happened in real life situations as the food ages now these were recently gifted to us and these are from 1999 one is red wheat and the other one is white wheat so it's going to kind of be fun to look at those um we have a can of 1996 wheat and this one is actually ours it is 31 years old it's white wheat from our personal food storage and we know where it's been and how it's been stored and we're gonna take that and make bread with it after we're done here and see how that turns out um this is wheat from 1998 and this is um oh this one's from ours too it's from 1991 only it's red wheat so let's let's just look at all this stuff first of all this one has an oxygen absorber in it right um the plate i don't know how you can see okay the wheat looks really good to me how about to you yeah this this can looks really good i don't see an oxygen absorber but i suspect it's down there somewhere um actually i think back then we were doing nitrogen flushes and so you'd stick a wand in here and you'd flush it with nitrogen to get the oxygen out so i believe that both of these cans were nitrogen flushed because that was just before they started using the um oxygen absorbers does have the oxygen absorber so the cans you first open them they smell a little bit like metal but um now it doesn't like now now that smell is gone you find that a lot with flour and you have to kind of leave it out for it to be okay but um okay as i'm looking at all of these i don't see any problem with any of them like nothing there's no bad smell i don't see anything that looks like it's degraded are you are you seeing anything no the number 10 cans they're just so perfect huh they provide the perfect environment they really do and even though one of these cans was really rusted on the outside i don't know which one it was even though the outside may have a problem the inside is still is still nice so number 10 cans are really good for your storage okay let's open these and see what they look like this one does have an oxygen absorber in it and it smells just fine and i don't see any kind of problems it's clean there's no insects or any uh debris in here so this looks really good actually all right here's the red wheat oxygen absorber see anything very similar there i don't see anything that's other than the fact that it's red and not white yeah um she can get over that oh he's a free man okay um it it really looks good i don't see any problem i mean a lot of times when we get gifted food storage we're looking at thinking ah this goes to the chickens because it's not something that we're okay eating um all of these look really good i do know that um ours were stored properly and we have a cool basement storage room to store them in so they've been stored right um the other two cans we were gifted by john's mom and she also had a basement storage room so that tells you how they restored now these were stored in a cool barn and so these look really good even considering that they were stored in a barn so um that says a lot about wheat wheat is one of the best um long-term foods to store because it really just stores forever like i think spelt and rye and kamut are in that same category right but the whole berry now if you were to grind this and try and store it it would be bad you should never use an oxygen absorber in that because you can have some serious problems and and have potential for botulism um but the whole wheat flour you want to grind it fresh and use it within a few days i had a friend bring me some over that she had in her food storage and she was just gonna you know save a step and grind it all now and store it that way and it smelled horrid it was really really bad so make sure that you store the wheat whole and then grind it it's important to know that as wheat ages the gluten degrades or the proteins degrade that are in it and so it will not raise as well so it will be really fun to see how this 31 year old wheat makes a loaf of bread okay now it's time to make whole wheat bread from 31 year old wheat flour and let me tell you i think it's going to be delicious now this recipe is from pantrysecrets.com i would definitely go to her website and get this recipe for yourself to make sure that you're doing it right but this is a great recipe and one of the reasons why i like it is because it uses the whole wheat flour yeast this is sunflower lecithin which has a really really long shelf life so far i haven't been able to find out i hear it's indefinite but i have not had it indefinitely i buy it in bulk um homemade applesauce you can use store-bought applesauce it just is not required but it helps the bread to stay moist because we're not using oil and then salt i always like to use pink himalayan salt and you can use sugar but we are going to use honey so let's get cooking now we are going to add our flour this is ten and a half cups of whole wheat flour and one of the things that i really liked about pantry secrets is that this is what you do you just put the flour in here and you measure it this is ten and a half cups now i'm gonna go and i'm going to put one cup of apple applesauce in here this is applesauce from our own trees um but i'm going to put one cup of applesauce fill the rest with half hot water to the water line which is really cool because it makes measuring easy we're going to add a tablespoon of salt and three heaping tablespoons of yeast so now we're gonna slightly mix these ingredients swish around here like that he's scaring me i should put the lid on it true so that's just getting it kind of mixed in together before we put in the rest of the ingredients now we're going to put in the sunflower lecithin and this is just four little dots that are about the size of a quarter the lecithin makes the it kind of takes the place of the gluten in the bread right it it makes it all really nice and raised nicely and it just totally improves the texture of the bread okay we're going to start mixing this now and colleen's going to add more of the ingredients here i'm just going to add the honey and we want to make sure that lecithin gets all mixed in so that it's evenly distributed in this recipe now here i have the apple sauce and the hot water and i'm just going to dump that whole thing in here this bread dough is going to be really sticky we want it to be more like cookie dough than bread dough because this is whole wheat bread we are going to knead it for 10 minutes in our mixer okay this is when it gets exciting so we have this absolutely gorgeous bread doughnut would you start here so we're going to spray the counter we've cleaned off this counter really well um but i really like to work on my countertop i'll need a little bit more than that you could just use olive oil if you want or well any kind of oil that makes you happy because the spray stuff doesn't store quite as long so if you have any good oil you can use that one of the things that the lecithin does is it makes this dough absolutely incredible can you see how beautiful it is well okay if you're not a dough connoisseur you might not understand this but this dough is absolutely beautiful and what i'm going to do is i'm just i'm just trying to get it can you spray a little bit more on there please this remember this dough is sticky and so um it's gonna take a little bit more oil so see what an absolutely beautiful loaf that is um my hands are nasty okay and i'm just gonna cut this loaf into four pieces okay these are all about equal which is exactly what we want and pantry secret reds teaches how to use this one little thing of bread a bread dough and change it into all kinds of different stuff now jonathan's favorite is cinnamon bread but if you can't tell he's not the one that usually makes the bread and so he needs to punch this down and now he's going to totally fill the middle with his cinnamon chips that he loves those are not food storage they're just going to make him happy but this is just a regular loaf of bread nice whole wheat bread that's gonna be absolutely delicious and the pan's been sprayed i'll just put this into the pan and we're going to let that rise now i'm going to take one of these and i'm going to cut it again and we're going to make little don't laugh i mean okay i was just gonna make the comparison but she made it do you like to work with it's just a little bit more sweetheart you know i just don't even know how to go about this i'll teach you come on we're okay okay so you've got those chips in there right how many chips did you put in there i got a pretty good handful i think you need more all right okay oh that's why come on come on more yeah baby okay now we've got more chips in here and we're gonna roll up this dough like this like this see how it's nice and and then we're going to tuck these ends under wow and now you can put it in the pan well i'll probably ruin it no you won't you'll be just fine okay there's a big difference right when you're first learning all of this seems so overwhelming and hard but once you get the hang of it and it doesn't take that long to get the hang of it it's so cool it's so fast it's so easy and holy bread is such a good thing for your family now the the trick with this for me with these littler ones is making sure that they're the same size and some of these aren't so you'll just see that mine aren't quite as perfect and but we do the same thing just like with these little tiny mini lows so we'll just like sort of punch it down roll it up we're going to tuck in the ends we want to make sure we keep those covered and these little guys well i guess they're just gonna be like that they'll be so handsome when they grow up okay the thing that i really really like about this recipe is it's very simple and yet it's also very very quick you can go from grinding the wheat to out of the oven in i think less than an hour i mean it's just really fast probably in the time it takes you to get to the store and back you can have fresh whole wheat healthy bread that's just amazing so now what i'm gonna make are just some croissant kind of dinner rolls they're not really croissant they're just made with the bread dough but they look really pretty and normally i would slather these in butter you could put garlic on them if you want but because ben won't eat them if i put butter on them i'm just going to make them plain but you could experiment with all kinds of super fun um fillings for these and it's just super easy intervals okay so we're just gonna take the big end and we're just gonna roll it up and see how pretty those look kind of really fancy it's okay baby the dough is you know in jonathan's defense the dough is very um wet but that's one of the things that will make the whole wheat dough um much more light and i just like it if you wouldn't touch it anymore i've done enough damage it's kind of it kind of created some issues here dear and you have to practice this now if you wait obviously this is new to me and it's going to take some time for me to get this figured out it's all right we're just going to have a couple of beautiful little baby bread rolls that that will look spectacular and and cut yourself some slack if you're just starting seriously just cut yourself some slack so on this tray this is equal to one quarter of um the batch because the batch does four loops of red and seriously go over to pantrysecrets.com and she has so many incredible ideas for different things that you can use bread as a base because remember wheat is a foundation in our food storage and there's so much that you can do with it to make to feed your family and to make life a little bit more enjoyable okay so the bread is out of the oven and it actually looks fantastic this is 31 year old wheat so what does that say about being able to store wheat and have it last for a really long period of time now the guidelines are that you should store between three and four hundred pounds of grain per person per year along with sixty pounds of legumes um we recommend somewhere in 150 pounds of wheat per person and then finish it off with things like white rice and rolled oats and different grains that are um good and that your family really enjoys yeah and the really phenomenal thing to me being an engineer and doing the numbers is in about an hour and for about a dollar a loaf um and loaf means these eight and those rolls and all of this for about a total of four dollars that's just amazing and it's so healthy and it's so good it is really crazy quite frankly that it's so inexpensive that is one of the ways that we were able to raise so those of you that don't know we actually have 11 children and that's a lot of mouths to feed and so as they were growing up that's what we did we just cooked everything from scratch and it's much less expensive to feed a bunch of teenagers with this kind of bread than it is white store-bought bread so now none of this matters unless it tastes good so quick all right get this cut johnny so let's look no butter at the texture of the bread it's actually a beautiful oat this is a cheater because this isn't full food storage it had the cinnamon chips in it but this is amazingly good very very good i don't even need butter on it it's just so good and now for the question of the day what is your favorite way to use whole wheat comment below and thanks for being part of the solution [Music] you

Channel: The Provident Prepper

Views: 4,222

Rating: 4.9773369 out of 5

Keywords: Pantry Secrets, Recipe for whole wheat bread, Food Storage, Recipes using whole wheat, Storing wheat long term, SHTF, TEOTWAWKI, Prepper, The Provident Prepper, Self-Reliance

Id: G-JssoOsoF8

Length: 27min 56sec (1676 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 20 2021