How to Seal Mylar Bags for Long Term Food Storage - Perfect For Your Prepper Pantry

today i want to share with you how to seal a mylar bag for long-term food storage perfect for your prepper pantry [Music] hi sweet friends i'm mary and welcome to mary's nest where i teach traditional cooking skills for making nutrient-dense foods like bone broth ferments sourdough and more so if you enjoy learning about those things consider subscribing to my channel and don't forget to click on the little notification bell below that'll let you know every time i upload a new video well mylar bags are great for storing dry goods with an oxygen absorber for long-term food storage in a previous video i explained to you what the difference is between oxygen absorbers and silica gel packs and when you want to use an oxygen absorber and i'll be sure to link to that video in the i cards and in the description below so that you can watch that and learn what the differences are but the bottom line is when you use oxygen absorbers you need to use foods that have 10 percent or less moisture so today using this mylar bag and an oxygen absorber we're going to store some white rice and white rice is perfect for storing in a mylar bag with an oxygen absorber because it is a dry food with 10 percent or less moisture now also in the description under this video i'll have a link to a blog post that will correspond directly with this video where i'll have various links where you can find out about what foods are appropriate for using with oxygen oxygen absorbers in addition to white rice but some examples are things like white flour which sometimes will be called all-purpose flour or bread flour that has all the bran and germ removed whole grain flour cannot be stored in a mylar bag with an oxygen absorber it's simply too oily now other foods that can be stored in a mylar bag with an oxygen absorber are whole grains now not whole grain flour but you can store whole grains in their whole form except for brown rice and barley and another food that you can store in a mylar bag with an oxygen absorber are beans a common question that i get is when you're storing dry foods in a mylar bag can you use an oxygen absorber and a silica gel pack and the answer is no the reason really is twofold number one you're already storing a dry food in a mylar bag with an oxygen absorber that's going to be very airtight and moisture isn't a problem so you don't really need something to absorb moisture but more importantly the reason why you don't use a silica gel pack when storing foods in a mylar bag with an oxygen absorber is because the oxygen the oxygen absorber actually needs that little bit of moisture that's 10 percent or less that's in the food to be activated oxygen absorbers are filled with an iron powder and what happens is a chemical reaction takes place when you put them in a mylar bag with a dry food that has 10 percent or less moisture that little bit of moisture causes the iron power powder to rust and now i'm not a scientist but apparently the chemical reaction that takes place in the process of that iron power powder rusting pulls out all of the oxygen from the packaging in which it's placed now what size of oxygen absorber do you need and that's a good question it all depends on what size mylar bag you're using and what food you're putting into your mylar bag and again if you open the description below underneath this video i'll link you over to my blog post and i'll have a link to the i believe it's called the u.s emergency usa emergency supply which is a website that lists all of the different size mylar bags that are made and then it lists what size oxygen absorber you need for the mylar bag plus it lists one more level of information not only do you need to know what size mylar bag you have for what size oxygen absorber you're going to need it does vary based on what you're putting into your mylar bag so if you're putting rice into a mylar bag which is very small and there's very little space between each grain so there's less oxygen in there there's going to be one size of oxygen absorber as opposed to say if you're putting beans in your mylar bag which are larger and there's more oxygen between each bean that's touching and then you need a different size a little larger oxygen absorber but they have a wonderful chart that walks you through not just the size of the mylar bag that you're using not just the size of the oxygen absorber you need based on that mylar bag but then it also lists what are you putting into the mylar bag and then you just look at the chart and bingo you've got the size oxygen absorber that you need now what you're going to need to get ready to seal your mylar bag obviously is your mylar bag and i recommend that you look when you buy these look for mylar bags that are heavy duty and ones that you don't see any light coming through when you hold when you hold them up to the light now if you're not buying them in person and you're buying them online you just want to look for terminology that says things like heavy duty mylar bag next you're going to want your oxygen absorbers and then you're going to want some sort of straight edge i've just got a yardstick here but if you have a ruler that'll work too but you want to make sure that the ruler is just completely fat flat not one that's beveled in any way and then you're going to need an iron and just any old household iron will do also i don't have one of these but if you have one of those flat iron tools that ladies use on their hair those can also be used to seal mylar bags now i also believe there is a special tool that is sold for specific that's specifically made for sealing mylar bags but a household iron or a flat iron hair tool both work well now in a one gallon mylar bag i find that i can comfortably fit five pounds of white rice now i don't weigh this out but you certainly could put your mylar bag onto a food scale and get exactly perfectly five pounds but i'm going to show you to the point where i like to fill my mylar bag which then makes it easy for me to lay it flat and to seal it now before you start filling your mylar bag you want to write on it what you're going to put in it and this is especially important if you're doing a lot of mylar bags in one sitting because you don't want to seal them up with different things and then you don't want to seal them up and then say oh my gosh which ones have the rice which one's out of the beans you know that can happen so just take some sort of permanent marker i really like for the mylar bags i like this um this is a bic and it's called mark it and i find that i really like this brand i have nothing to do with the company this is just a brand that i like more so than the sharpie i find the sharpie sometimes smudges but this marks up the bag beautifully and stays in place so this is white rice it's jasmine rice so i'm going to write on my bag jasmine rice and then i'm going to put how much it is and this is going to be about five pounds and then i'm going to put the date when i'm sealing this and right now we're in september so i'm just going to put 9 and then 20 20. so then i have that all marked for me and what you'll want to do is mark your bags you know in advance or right before you're filling each one you know whatever works whatever system works best for you but don't forget to do this now if you're going to be filling a lot of mylar bags you want to make sure that you have all your bags ready and you have them all filled with whatever you're putting in them before you even open your oxygen absorbers so i'm going to go ahead and start filling my mylar bag with my white rice and i'll show you at the point where i feel that it's full enough so i've got in my mylar bag what is about five pounds of white rice then i like to do just something like this where i try to compress it as much as possible to get the rice as compacted as possible and after i do that my bag is actually filled to about this point now i don't cut anything off the top and then try to seal it here what i find is easier to do is just keep the bag intact and then go ahead and seal it just along the top here and then before we leave it to let the oxygen absorber do its work i like to kind of flatten it out so that as the oxygen is absorbed it just turns out to be a nice little narrow flat bag filled with rice now as we get ready to seal this what we're going to do again we're going to open our oxygen absorbers at the very last minute the first thing that we're going to do is turn on our iron iron and to seal a mylar bag somewhere around 350 degrees fahrenheit to 400 degrees fahrenheit works very well so if your iron lets you set a temperature you know to set it somewhere in that range and the same with your flat hair flat iron if it allows you to set an actual temperature that's the range that you're looking for 350 degrees fahrenheit to about 400 degrees fahrenheit what i have found on my iron which does not indicate the temperature i have found that number six for cotton works very well now as that's heating up once it beeps and it tells me my iron is hot enough that there we go at the temperature that i need then i would get ready to open my oxygen absorber and my bag of oxygen absorbers i would cut this open and there are 10 in here they come in all different amounts in terms of how they're packaged how they're sold so on and so forth i would hopefully be having 10 bags so that i would be using all the oxygen absorbers up in one fell swoop and if i had 10 bags lined up i would stick the oxygen absorber in each bag and then just go down my little assembly line sealing my bags very quickly because it only takes seconds now based on the chart that i mentioned to you earlier at the usa emergency supply site they recommend that when you're storing white rice in a mylar bag that's a one gallon size that you need approximately a 300 cc i think it stands for cubic centimeters and that's what i've got here i've got 10 300 cc oxygen absorbers so i would be putting one 300 cc oxygen oxygen absorber into my one gallon mylar bag filled with about five pounds of rice now if you have 100 cc oxygen absorbers you'd put in three now at that site if you it also shows that say for example you don't have any 100 cc oxygen absorbers you don't have any 300 cc oxygen absorbers not to worry you can put ones in that are in essence a little bit of overkill they show if you have a 1000 cc or a 500 cc oxygen absorber that you can put that in this bag it's just a little more than you need but if that's all that you have and you're not able to get other sized oxygen absorbers you can do that so definitely check out that chart it's very informative now i'm not going to open this bag of oxygen absorbers because i already did open a bag and i've got it here and what you want to do is say for example that you're opening your bag of oxygen absorbers and it has more oxygen oxygen absorbers in it than you're going to use at the time when you open it you want to have a little jar ready that's got a nice tight seal to it preferably one that can be airtight and then you're going to want to put the oxygen absorbers in your jar that you're not going to use that the ones if you have any you've put them all in your mylar bags but say you have a few left over go ahead and put them in a jar and seal it right away and if you're using a little canning jar like this that has a canning lid that has the little rubber gasket and then the canning ring or some people call it the canning ban the oxen the oxygen absorbers will actually pull out the oxygen in this jar and cause the charge to seal so they they do a little bit of work in there something that i've also done is use the handheld foodsaver to pull out some air so as to hopefully preserve my oxygen absorbers as long as possible now i'm going to very quickly there we go open this jar i'm going to go ahead and drop my oxygen absorber in and i'm going to seal that up fast now what i'm going to do is with my oxygen absorber i'm going to gently lay this bag on its side and i'm going to just try to keep it a little tight to try to keep as much air out of keep as much oxygen or air out of the bag squeeze as much as out as squeeze as much out as possible and then i'm just going to put the my i'm going to put the top of this mylar bag on my straight edge and the reason that i'm putting it on a ruler like this that is a straight edge is because i don't want to iron on my cutting board so that's why i've got this and you do need some nice flat surface that is also not rough because if i were to just try to seal this mylar bag on my tile here that has grout this grout is very rough and it could actually cause some tears in the mylar bag so you want to make sure that everything you're doing is being done on a smooth surface then you want to make sure that you got your iron hot enough look around make sure there's no oxygen absorber make sure that it's in there i think we've all been guilty on occasion of forgetting to put something in a bag after and then realizing that only after we've sealed it so there is a gentleman here on the internet who seals his bag three quarters of the way and then looks around to make sure he he's put his oxygen absorber in there before he he seals the last quarter so that's a clever idea but again so you just take your iron and you go right down on your straight edge right on top of your bag don't worry it's not going to harm your iron it's going to be just fine and you'll see it's going to start sealing so then you're just going to go with your iron all the ways across and literally within seconds your bag is sealed and then you can just check it by taking a look at it you'll see all done it seals up beautifully you can look right along the edge here there's no gaps and it literally as i said it seals in seconds you go over it with your iron and voila it's perfect now you'll see as you pick this up you can see this edge is beautifully sealed there's no gaps there's no air getting in here so this is a perfect seal now another way if you do have that flat iron hair tool you can just leave your bag sitting up like this and then you can just take your little hair tool and just start clipping it uh in essence you're not cutting it but you're clip you're just going across like this with the heat of that flat iron and you're doing the same thing you're doing with your household iron where you're just sealing it right up so that you have a perfectly tight seal where no air is getting in now what i like to do is take my bag on a nice smooth surface again nothing that has anything rough or jagged on it and then i just like to shake out the rice a little bit just so that everything is a little just evenly distributed throughout the bag i don't want to have that big bulk of rice bulging down on the bottom the reason i like to distribute the rice throughout my bag is as the oxygen absorber begins to do its job and over the next 12 24 hours maybe 48 hours as it starts to pull out all of the oxygen in this bag it's going to become very hard almost like a brick and with the rice nicely distributed through the bag it becomes a nice little kind of flat envelope style bag as opposed to a chubby bag that has a big chunk of rice on the bottom and i like to do it this way because i find that they're easier to store when they're in that sort of thin type uh form you know thin type shape but if you want to just leave them up like this if it's easier for you uh depending on where you're leaving these as they're as the oxygen absorber is doing its job that's fine too it's totally up to you but if you want to do what i do just make sure that you do shake it out on a smooth surface that's not going to damage your bag and then just leave it in this position while you know for the next 12 24 or whatever the case may be hours while the oxygen absorber is doing its job now i just want to show you the difference between a bag that was sealed about 12 hours ago and the bag that we just sealed as you'll see you can see the oxygen absorber is doing its job and it's pulling out a lot of the oxygen and it's creating something that is very dense you can see the bag is starting to like crunch up and all the air is being or all the oxygen is being absorbed out of it and over the next couple of hours it's going to become it's quite hard but it'll become even harder almost like a brick and then you'll know that you've had good success getting all of the oxygen out so hopefully you can see the difference i'll put them like this when they're side by side this is your before and this is about after about 12 hours and this will become even tighter probably over the next 12 hours probably after about 24 hours i find to be the case with rice that this is going to be very tight and hard like a brick now one thing i want to mention is that the oxygen absorber as the name implies is absorbing oxygen now other things are left behind those other things being nitrogen and so some people i have seen on the internet say that if your bag doesn't come out like this that it still may be okay and the oxygen oxygen absorber may have done its job it's just a it's turning off my iron's turning off uh it may just uh have the nitrogen in there and so it's not becoming really tight but i have not experienced that so i can't uh speak to that uh exactly but that's something that is probably worth researching if you find that over time your bag is not tightening up the way this one has now i as i shared with you in my two previous videos where we talk about oxygen absorbers and silica gel packs and various type of long-term food storage containers and i'll put all these videos in a playlist and i'll link to them in the description underneath this video so they'll have them all in one place and and you can watch them as you need but generally what i do is i store these in five gallon uh food safe it's not necessarily that important that they're food safe because they're in mylar bags but that's what i have are the food safe buckets and they're heavy duty and the reason that i do that is because these are not rodent proof a rodent can chew through this now yes they can also some people have reported they've also chewed through heavy duty five gallon buckets so it really all depends where you're going to be storing your food if you're going to be storing this in your extended pantry or you know what we call the prepper pantry and you know that your food will not be susceptible to being attacked more or less by rodents then yes you can store your mylar bag just like this however mylar bags can become damaged they can get little rips in them and so on and so forth so i think putting them in some type of container that does give them an extra level of protection is a smart idea so as i said i'll go ahead and put these in the 5 gallon food long-term food storage buckets that i have but some of you have shared with me such a good idea in comments when we were talking about other long-term storage containers and i loved this idea some of you said you do the same thing i do you flatten them out so they're like a little envelope and then you get those large plastic containers that have like big lids on them sometimes they're like rubbermaid type things like that but you get heavy duty ones and you just put all of your bags because you're really storing up a lot of food and you're putting all of these bags just like this in those large containers and you know they sometimes have a footprint you know maybe about the size of this cutting board or even larger so you're doubling up you're doing two by two and you're just putting them all in long ways i think that's a really good idea because you can certainly fit more in those and more efficiently than you can in a five gallon bucket and then each time you need a bag of rice boom or whatever you've stored in your mylar bag you just pull that out then you put your lid back on to your storage container and back onto your shelf so you're giving the mylar bag protection from damage as well as protection from rodents now why do we do this why are we taking this rice out of maybe the big 25 or 50 pound bag that we're buying and putting them into mylar bags with oxygen absorbers and that's a great question storing dry foods in mylar bags with oxygen absorbers serves a couple of purposes number one it keeps it as fresh as possible for as long as possible and it makes a very unhospitable environment for bugs uh to proliferate so if there were any bugs hopefully because you're pulling out all the oxygen they're going to die or secondly if there are any eggs the fact that this is an oxygen-free environment isn't going to allow those eggs to hatch now is it a perfect solution no i'm not sure other than using diatomaceous earth when you store food in big buckets if there's a perfect solution at killing bugs but this has been found for the most part to decrease the incidence of bugs also storing dry food in mylar bags with oxygen absorbers really helps extend the shelf life significantly now there are different opinions in different sources on exactly how long this food will last given that it is white rice some will call this what's known as a forever food and more or less often regardless of how you store it but this is definitely going to ensure that maybe it will be a forever food some people may say it's good for 40 years you can open it in 40 years and it'll be great some other people will say some other sources will say maybe 25 years but whatever the case may be you're definitely extending significantly the shelf life of dry goods that you store in mylar bags with oxygen absorbers and again in the description below i'll have a link to my blog post head on over there i've got lots of links to all kinds of sites that are authoritative sources on how to use mylar bags how to use oxygen absorbers what foods you can store in mylar bags with oxygen absorbers and how long those foods may be preserved in this fashion now if you'd like more information about what are the best types of containers for your long-term food storage for your prepper pantry as well as information on how to stock your prepper pantry with real food how to do this on a budget for five dollars a week and then how to use the food that you've got in your prepper pantry and how to make some of it homemade be sure to click on this video over here and i'll see you over there in my texas hill country kitchen love and god bless

Channel: Mary's Nest

Views: 15,478

Rating: 4.977169 out of 5

Keywords: how to seal mylar bags, seal mylar bag, mylar bags, seal mylar bag with iron, mylar bags oxygen absorbers, long term food storage, long term food storage mylar bags, long term food storage prepping, long term food storage pantry, prepper pantry, food storage, food storage prepping, food storage preppers, marysnest, marys nest, mylar bag sizes, How to Seal Mylar Bags for Long Term Food Storage - Perfect For Your Prepper Pantry, how to seal mylar bags for long term food storage

Id: 3jbrw-NLF_I

Length: 27min 4sec (1624 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 29 2020