Long Term Storage of Dry Foods

good morning and welcome to rose red homestead before we get started today i just want to make one short announcement one of our youtube family homesteaders had some really sad news heather from needy homestead and that's k-n-e-a-d-y like you need bread and i don't know her i think i've watched maybe one or two of her videos but she and her family she and her husband and two small children went out for valentine's dinner last month and on the way home they were struck head on by a driver in a pickup truck and the husband was killed and the rest of the three are injured but they are okay there has been a gofundme page set up for them and even though we don't know them we have made a contribution because what a devastating event that is and the husband was the major breadwinner of the family and even though they have met their goal um i think that they have way underestimated how much money they're going to need to get things restarted so i know several of our own subscribers has have mentioned this to me and have mentioned that they have also made contributions so if you are in a mind to do that i know that they could use every single penny that could be contributed i will put the link to the gofundme page right below the video okay now for today's video three weeks maybe four weeks ago we made a video on is oven canning of dry food safe and of course during that video we learned that it was not some of the things that i said in that video were that we live here in the desert we have very few problems with bugs and so um i said we don't usually do a whole lot to disinfect the dry foods before we put them up even for long term i had a lot of response to that from people who live in other parts of the country and i should have remembered i lived in houston my first husband i put him through dental school and then we came back for him to be a professor at that dental school for three years and we had a house full of little kids and we did a lot of um food storage then in houston which is very hot very humid and i remember the things that we had to do and so i thought maybe today i should come back and do a video on how to do long-term storage of food regardless of where you live the second verse of that is that jim and i had a bag of rice that we bought at costco 25 pounds of rice that we just had in our pantry here for oh probably two years even while i was making that other video and saying we hardly ever had any trouble with um bugs getting into our food well after that video i thought hmm i better go check on that rice and maybe we do need to do something with it so i may should maybe should put it in the freezer and put it into smaller cans we opened it up it was full of weevils full of weevils and so that was another motivating factor it ended up out in the trash i wasn't going to try to salvage it at all it wasn't that expensive in the first place so today we're going to learn two very safe methods of storing food long term and we'll get to that in just a moment [Music] i've had to set up a little station here and i have a mylar bag and these are food grade plastic bags i mean plastic buckets five gallon blankets with gamma lids and the gamma lid has a ceiling gasket in this little groove right here and so these are especially designed for long-term storage and so these are the buckets and the lids that we're going to be using today now when my first husband and i were doing food storage when our children were really young and we lived in houston we got together with a number of other young couples about our age from our church and we would order bulk um orders of things like wheat and all kinds of beans and rice and then when the truck came and delivered all of our goods we'd have it delivered to somebody's front yard and we'd all go over there with our buckets unload the truck and divvy out the stuff and then we would start processing them now there was no such thing as mylar in those days i was just thinking the other day that you know i marvel that my grandparents were born in 1900 and that was before the wright brothers even took their first flight so they were born before aviation ever took off pun intended and so my grandchildren can say about me boy grandma was born before cell phones can you believe that well not only that but before computers and before mylar so now we have mylar but the way that we used to do it back then was that we would just dump and there weren't not food grade buckets we didn't have a lot of plastics back then and so we did use buckets but um we would dump our wheat in these buckets and sometimes they were bigger than five gallon buckets we would take little cloth pads and put liquid insecticide on those cloth pads and this insecticide was considered safe for food back then and then we would just put that saturated pad inside the bucket on top of the wheat and then put the lid on and that then it was good for 30 years and i used that wheat for years and years that is no longer considered safe so don't do that there are two basic ways that are considered safe to do long-term storage of dry foods beans rice lentils grains like wheat and rye and so i'm going to show you both of those ways the first is to use these mylar bags now i bought a packing and i've never used mylar just for long-term storage so this is my first time doing mylar but i wanted to show it to you so i needed to learn it myself so i bought a pack of 10 5 gallon mylar bags and it came with this pack of oxygen absorbers these are the 2 000 size you use 200 for quartz and 500 for two quarts and um the the literature the research is all over the place it depends on whether or not you are reading someone who is selling these or someone like a state extension office who has impartial views but the range of how much oxygen absorber you need absorber you need for five gallons ranges from 500 cc's to 2 000 and so 2000 came with this package and i think as set up for 10 5 gallon buckets was twenty five dollars the buckets themselves were four dollars and the lids were two dollars so it adds up um and i think that there is also a better way in the way that i prefer and we'll show you that one second but in this bucket we have a wheat and it's filled to the top with wheat inside this mylar bag now the trick is that we now have to seal this mylar bag we have to put an oxidative absorber in here and then we have to seal it now this sealer is the best sealer that i have ever had there's a little one that comes with my little vacuum sealer it's not anywhere near big enough that can do a mylar bag like this this is an impulse sealer it came with our freeze dryer it's the best thing i've ever seen in my life for sealing mylar and so this is what we're going to use now first of all i need to cut open this package of oxygen absorbers now the little button here is pink which means they're still good on the inside the minute i cut this open they're going to start absorbing oxygen so i'm only going to use one here and then i'm going to put the rest in this quart jar put the lid on really fast and then we'll probably go off camera and vacuum seal it before we're done so give me just a minute to get these in this jar and there are 10 of them we'll be using another one here in just a minute so i'm not quite going to vacuum seal it yet i'm going to put this lid on really really tight and i'm going to take this one this is the size and i'm just going to drop it right down in there where i can start doing its thing now so the question is how do we get this is heavy i can barely lift one of these jim helped me get this all set up this morning so how do we seal this i can't doesn't reach so we were figuring it out and this impulse sealer you just plug it in it does not have to warm up as soon as you push the thing down there's a red light which you'll see in a minute when i flip it to the other side so i'm going to go ahead and plug it in and then we're going to put it right on top of the bucket [Applause] and slide it to where it's still pretty steady and i can slip this under here make it very smooth and then i'm going to seal half of it all right it says it's done let's check it from the other side all right looks pretty good i'm going to double seal this so i can't go any farther this way so i'm going to come up a little bit this way and seal it in a second place the light goes off when they say it's done okay all right that looks really good now i'm going to flip this around and this time you'll get to see the red light which is right here when i do this other side and all i have to do is just intersect somehow with this seal and we'll be good it is off all right this is all sealed down the oxygen absorber is doing its work and we're going to get one of those yama lids and we'll fasten this down now the oxygen absorber is going to take care of the bubble there and so pretty soon this is all going to be flat so i will write on the top of this um i'm gonna go get a hammer there we go okay it is still a little bit up on this side um i got out all of the air out of that that i could but i'll try to do a better job next time but once all that oxygen gets absorbed it will go flat and i'll be able to put the lid down flat now here's what happens on the inside with um with the oxygen absorber the biggest enemy to food storage long-term food storage of dry goods is oxygen gets in there and allows bugs to grow and reproduce almost all i'm going to say all of the little critters that get into our dried foods require oxygen and so if we remove the oxygen what are we going to kill well we will kill any adults we will kill any larva what we will not kill is the pupa or the eggs however the research from state extension offices says that if it is held for 12 days this way then ultimately everything gets killed um there is some literature out there that says oh if you do this you have to check it every few years and and redo it and you can certainly do that if you want to it probably is not necessary um i i use the other way that i'm going to show you and i don't ever reopen those and i've never had troubles that doesn't mean i won't because i'm learning from experience so we're going to set this aside and then i'm going to show you one from start to finish i'm going to start this one from scratch so here is an empty bucket now i have sanitized these on the inside also the lid and here is my um mylar bag so i'm just going to put this in the bucket and expand it as much as possible and this time i'm going to do this rice this is our replacement bag for the one that had all the weevils in it so i'm just going to open it up i'm going to bother with those strings they drive me nuts okay now this this was supposed to come inside a plastic bag but they missed the bag and so it's just loose mostly inside this bag so here you go you can see this see here's the plastic bag clear over on the side and then the rice is just loose in here and it looks good i don't see any evidence of weevils at all so i think we're good okay so i'm just going to dump this in okay so that was 20 pounds of rice to retrieve that plastic bag that they missed completely all right come take a look here's the top of the bucket right here so we still have some room in here and i'm pushing this down so i have some other rice that i'm going to be putting on the top of this to fill up this bucket okay so now we have a full bucket of rice no evidence of any life anything in there okay so try to get more air out of this this time i'm gonna turn this so that it is parallel to the impulse sealer [Applause] and we're going to drop in our [Music] oxygen absorber that was already starting to suck that lid in okay now i tried to get out more of the oxygen there so this bag will lie flat on the top and since i have it facing this direction i'll just do it this direction first so this is my second time doing it i think i'll be a little bit better at it i still have air in here well [Applause] i suppose if i did about 10 of them in a row i would get better at not leaving quite so much air in there um i don't know if this one is going to seal until after that oxygen absorber has done some of its work we'll see thank you it's not going to so we'll put this aside for several hours and let it seal and then we'll write on it the second method is my very favorite because it is so quick and it is so effective but you do need dry ice you need to know some safety rules dry ice is frozen carbon dioxide it is what makes carbonated beverages when i was little we used to use dry ice all the time to make um root beer and you probably have seen it frozen carbon dioxide dry ice is you don't want to bring it in contact with your skin because it will instantly freeze dry your skin and it's like frostbite so don't let it touch your skin and i'm just going to use these little gloves and you can get away with using gloves because it won't touch my skin but you cannot cradle it very long if you use gloves this thin reason i'm using these gloves is because i am dealing with food today and i don't want to use my gardening gloves or any other gloves that are dirty so i'm just going to use these now i've handled dry ice a whole lot and it you just need to remember that it is giving off a gas and so you do not want to put it immediately into a closed jar and put the lid on it will explode the glass and i have actually seen that happen um it was quite dangerous it was when i was in the sixth grade and one little boy ended up with an injury that was awful okay so here is this dry ice um and so i want to demonstrate to you what it does and why it works so i'm just going to put some regular water in this jar and then i'm going to just whack off a piece and drop that right down in there now notice when the carbon dioxide comes up what does it do immediately it falls down and it rolls along wherever it's going to go why does it do that because it is heavier than air now remember we're wanting to get rid of the oxygen in our grain barrels in our food barrels what better way would there be than to put a piece of dry ice down at the bottom of the barrel let it sublimate like this because it's going to be enclosed in a bucket it's not going to sweep away every place instead it will fill the bucket with carbon dioxide and it will displace the oxygen is that cool or what and so that's what we're going to do so this is how you do a carbonated beverage um we would get as a child a root beer extract five pounds of sugar five gallons of water five pounds of dry ice i still remember that recipe and we let it sit in there until that root beer was carbonated and it was one of the biggest treats we ever had as children now if you are living in an area like for instance houston that is very human here's a caution one of the things that you need to pay attention to the humidity the moisture in the air will condense on top of this super cold and it will build ice it will build frost crystals frost crystals are water and so be sure before you put it in your grain that you don't have any frost crystals at all okay now all we need to go into our grain bucket oh well my floor will not be hurt there we go i want to smash it about like this so it will sublimate pretty quickly and we need only about four ounces to go in a five gallon bag so i'm going to turn my little scale on right here and i'm just going to put until we get about four ounces that's five ounces that'll be fine all right so then what do we do well so i'm going to be doing these barrels of wheat right here now there's a little story behind this my son who works all over the country and he comes home and this is kind of his home base when he can be in town for a couple of weeks between another assignment where he goes out um and so just at the beginning of koved last year he decided he wanted to participate in some of our food storage endeavors and so he bought 100 pounds of winter red wheat and we put it this is only thing we had we just put it in these i think these are home depot barrels and it's been fine for a year it's just been sitting in there but i'm going to move it into these now food grade barrels i'm going to put that dry ice in on the top of it so that the carbon dioxide will replace the oxygen and i'll show you how we're going to do that so the first thing that i'm going to do is i'm just going to put a little bit of grain in the bottom i want a couple of inches of grain in the bottom here okay so here's about two inches of grain and now while jim has a camera right here i'm just going to throw this dry ice right in there just like that now some people will put this on a paper towel i don't i just put it right there and because there was no frost on it there's not going to be any condensation so make sure you clear the frost off of that first and then i'm just going to fill it up notice no mylar bag don't need a mylar bag here oh so we got almost all of it i'm going to put just a little bit more okay now that dry ice is going to sublimate what i do not want to do right now is to put this lid on really tight because it will blow the lid so what we want to do is to let it sublimate for an hour and then we'll come in and then i'll put the lid down tight but then we don't want to leave it like that we want to come back and check it about every hour to be sure the bucket is not bulging or the lid is not bulging if it is then we need to burp it to let some of that carbon dioxide out so what happens on the inside of this one is that same thing it displaces all of the oxygen so the bugs can't live and if that carbon dioxide stays in place for 12 days it will cycle through several different life cycles of those bugs if there are eggs they'll hatch and they'll hatch into an atmosphere of carbon dioxide and they can't possibly survive so after 12 days we know that we're okay ultimately neither the oxygen absorbers or the dry ice method will prevent oxygen from seeping back in through the plastic and through the mylar for 30 years oxygen is going to get back in there and it's okay at that point because there's nothing left in there that will reproduce one of the things that when we think about long-term storage is we want to be sure that we the see that the grains and the beans are still viable in case we want to sprout and grow them now that's another reason why you don't ever want to do oven canning of dry foods is because once they go through that oven process heating even up to as low as 100 degrees 130 degrees kills the viability and i know that because i just recently did an experiment to show that very thing um so we'll come back in about an hour or so and we'll i've got this lid skewed just a little bit so some of that once it builds up all the way out then it will bubble out over the top then we'll put the lid on so we'll check it in again in about an hour this one has been sublimating for an hour now one thing is you will never see the carbon dioxide coming out like we did on that jar you just won't not when you put in so little in such a big barrel like this so you just give it enough time and i'm not going to take this lid off but what i am going to do now is to set this lid in place and you can tell when this is in place because the edge is no longer flaring out this means that it's seated very well against that gasket up inside there now i'm going to be watching this for another hour or two to be sure that i don't need to burp it if i do need to burp it i'll just burp it we also had enough dry ice to do three more and these are the other two that we did on camera the red winter wheat and the basmati rice on the bottom those are both with the mylar and the oxygen absorbers so today we have done a total of about 200 pounds of wheat and about 40 pounds of rice so that's pretty good for one session and i hope this was meaningful to you and we will see you next time with our next video thanks for watching

Channel: RoseRed Homestead -- That "Woman with a Gadget"

Views: 179,408

Keywords: Grain Storage., rice storage, long term storage, dry ice for storing foods, Dry Foods

Id: Ct18THw4w-M

Length: 28min 37sec (1717 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 06 2021