PANTRY TOUR (Storing a YEARS worth of food!)

you guys have been asking me for a long time to do a pantry tour and here it is almost march the pantry has already started to reduce in how much food i have stored in there but i decided to go ahead and show you guys around all of my food storage areas so here we go [Music] well welcome to my pantry it is almost march and so we've been eating off of the pantry for months now and i thought i'd bring you guys in show you my different pantry areas and see what's left of our food storage as we're starting to get into late winter here we are in the main pantry area this is where most of my canned goods and preserved foods stay right here i have a really big mix of all different types of canned goods i also have a lot of freeze-dried foods kind of mixed in here this is freeze-dried raspberries oh my goodness if you guys don't have a freeze dryer you should consider getting one just for the berries they are phenomenal but we also have a mixture of some meals in here this is a turkey enchilada soup and it is so incredibly good i love having canned meals on the shelf this looks like marshmallows but it's actually freeze-dried white onions and you want to talk about a great way to make a meal easier to make just have your onions ready to go chopped and ready to go we also have our dehydrated fruit stashed in here and around these are prunes from our prune tree jams jellies oh this is a raspberry chipotle sauce that i can this year it is so incredibly good with a little bit of cream cheese and some crackers oh so delicious we also have a lot of pickles you can see from my storage we had a really good cucumber year this year and i made a lot of pickles i may have made too many because we still have a whole lot of pickles here this is some apple juice this is apple cider from our own apple trees but then we have some more freeze-dried food over here and these are freeze-dried chopped tomatoes you guys this is another one of those game changers you can chop these things stick them in the freeze dryer and then you can use them however you want you don't even have to peel them so it makes it really really fun and easy we're still eating off of our home canned green beans we eat a lot of these in the winter and we've got a lot left which is good because we're still a couple months away from having anything green in the garden so these are really kind of the backbone of a lot of the vegetables that we're eating out of food storage in the winter we do have some canned meats here this is a canned chicken these are another really really handy thing to keep on hand i love having these canned meats they just mean we can have a really quick meal whenever we want them they're not beautiful they're not pretty to look at but boy they taste so good and they're so juicy like moist they don't dry out because they cook in their own juices so it's just absolutely amazing i really really like this what else have we got in here we have oh homegrown beans i'm really excited about these we just did a little bit of these for an experiment this year and they are turning out so incredibly well we only have about a gallon of them so it's not a ton but now that we know how great they are we'll probably do extra this year i also like to keep a lot of our bulk foods both purchased foods in this area we've got things like our maple syrup that we get from azure standard we don't have maple trees here yet and it's going to be a long time after we put them in before we'll be able to tap our own so i just go ahead and purchase this in bulk other things like extra good vinegars white wine vinegar apple cider vinegars we keep all those on hand now this is one thing i'm super excited about and i've got to show you guys and this is our own instant mashed potatoes these are freeze-dried mashed potatoes and they make a mashed potato powder they are so amazing to rehydrate and cook up really really quickly so this is great because the potatoes were starting to get soft we don't really have a great root cellar where we're at so we kind of make do by just sticking them down in the basement but that doesn't get them all winter long so we went ahead and as they were just about to get soft stuck them into the freeze dryer after we cooked them and made up these instant mashed potatoes and they're so incredible i really really like these guys now we do have some store-bought food storage over here we don't grow all of our own food there are some things that we like to augment with usually we buy them bulk when we can this is from azure standards so we buy a lot of stuff from azure standard to fill up our bulk shelves things like mild green chilies to have on hand or black olives there's just no way we're ever going to grow those around here in north idaho i like to keep a little bit of pizza sauce on hand just for good homemade pizzas we don't grow enough tomatoes here in north idaho yet so you can see a lot of the things we have are the tomato-based things we've got canned tomatoes we've got the pizza sauce we have a good marinara sauce we like to keep those on hand one day hopefully we'll be able to grow enough but at the moment we don't most of this now has gone to just empty jar storage as we're emptying out spaces we're consolidating it and then we put our empty jars here so they're ready to grab next season but we do have some of our absolute favorite what we call crabby sauce and this is a crab apple sauce it is so incredibly good but i found a really amazing method for making this this year and that is that i used my steam juicer so if i put the crab apples into the steam juicer i get the cider off one end and then i get the really thick pulp off the other i run that pulp through the mill and i have amazing applesauce whether it's regular apples or crab apples but we really like the krabby sauce it's really tasty but then we also get all of that good cider and we can can that and use that too so it's kind of like two for one this is a really fun item right here this is watermelon ryan pickles now i know we've often heard about these but they've kind of fallen out of favor and they are phenomenally good they're really tasty the kids absolutely love them they're kind of like a sour gummy bear would be the best way that i could describe these i'm sure you could do them with all different flavor profiles let's go check out some of the other food storage items now when it comes to our staple food we like to store them bulk in a little bigger item things like these five gallon gamma seal buckets or even these 55 gallon drums in the drums we have things like hard white wheat whole beans we have oats oat groats salt sugar other items like that just so that we can stay nicely topped off for these items and stay ahead of the curb in the five gallon buckets we keep all sorts of other items that we don't need in quite that quantity things like baking soda flaxseed and anything else that falls in that smaller item would go in one of these and we actually have a lot of them but they're kind of spread out all over the place we don't have a great spot for all of them to be all at the same spot here we are in the preservation kitchen you guys see this area a lot because this is where i tend to film that way i stay out of the busyness of the main household but we do store quite a bit of food in this area also things like different jams and jellies this is a rhubarb marmalade and oh my goodness it is absolutely delicious we do have some tomatoes in here and look more pickles i think i went a little crazy on the pickles this is some chicken pot pie filling this is a freeze-dried chicken pot pie filling these make the most amazing grab-and-go lunches if you can make some good freeze-dried meals something that you really like and can pack it into a small jar like this and then you can just grab it and fill it up with some hot water when you're ready to eat it these are so amazing here we are on the other side and this has a lot of fruit and other freeze-dried things you do see we do have some canned here's some plum jam we actually don't go through the jam that quickly in our house we don't eat a very lot of the sweetened jams but we do try to make sure when we have a good fruit year that we get a lot in because we don't always have a good fruit here this is more of our freeze-dried fruit foods here these are freeze-dried cherries from our own cherry tree those are really good but they're not my favorite i've gotta say these strawberries though are phenomenally good these things are so amazing i really like that here's some freeze-dried broccoli that we did this is good and these are the freeze-dried pickles that i tried i had so many pickles that i went ahead and freeze-dried some and they are so incredibly flavorful they're also going to be a lot of fun for just tossing into things like potato salad so that i don't have to go get out a fresh jar of pickles if i don't have one open there's some more meat up here preserved meat that we've got canned meat and some more apple cider this is some of that beautiful pink crab apple cider it's so delicious it's so tangy really flavorful we have a tendency to throw these things into a crock pot with some mulling spices and call that the hot drink of choice for when the kids are out playing in the snow that way we don't have to have quite as much sugar as like a hot chocolate or a store-bought cider mix right now this is an area that i really want you guys to see it's an area that i've been kind of embarrassed about for a while because it's just not very cute but it is really really practical now i'm excited because this year i'm gonna redo this area and make it what i want so that we really like being in here this area is right off the kitchen and the real benefit of this is this is an exterior wall and there's a window right here which means i can open this window and that window back there and i effectively have a walk-in refrigerator most of the winter so that means i can store a lot of food in here for a long time which is really exciting you guys know that in my kitchen i don't really like a lot of appliances out on the counter i feel like they clutter the area and they just make it not so nice to work in i went ahead and created what i call my appliance bar and this is where all the appliances live except for my most often grabbed appliances those may stay in the kitchen but for the most part they're back here until i need them this is also where all the quick grab foods live so we have buckets of things that we're going to grab really quickly salt sugar flour whole wheat things like that and those live right up here we refill these buckets from those big barrels down in the basement we also have this great rack right here which houses our eggs so whenever we're getting eggs they get to sit right in here because it's nice and cool and then we've got a lot of my herb storage for my culinary herbs when i am storing them in the fall and drying them in the fall they come back here because we have this great airflow but it stays nice and dry and it's shady so it's like the perfect place for drawing herbs and they can actually sit out pretty well for about six to eight months without losing much of their flavor as long as they're in this whole form so then when i need some i just grab them crunch them up and they're good to go and oh they taste so incredible here we are out in the garage where we store all of our freezers and all of the meat that stores in them now again you guys we have a really large family so it takes a lot of meat for our household we grow and raise most of our own meat here so this is the pork freezer this is where we have most of the pork and usually venison we're already getting low on venison this time of year this freezer right here is for lamb we have beef we do buy in a little bit of salmon because we don't have access to any good salmon we like having a little bit of that on hand and we have beef look at this big turkey we raised this year and we did a lot of them so that's one of the remaining ones i'm going to get that guy canned up here in the next month or two this also has a lot of the fat that we've brought in this year so lard tallow all waiting to be rendered this is nice and full and should get us a long ways but we still have another freezer this is the poultry freezer this is where we keep all of those chickens and ducks that we raised this year this is going to get us all the way through until next year and one last freezer here this one doesn't light up so it's a little hard to see but in general this is our dairy freezer and this is where we fill our you know store our butter that we've made all year and our milk also any cheeses that we like to freeze things like mozzarella cheese or ricotta cheese so that we can have them year long round go into this freezer hey if you're ready to start storing your own food or even just more of your own food check out this video right here where i talk about how to correctly store your bulk bot food so that they last for a good long time

Channel: Homesteading Family

Views: 131,251

Keywords: Homesteading, Homesteading Family, food storage, pantry tour, homestead pantry, root cellar, long term food storage, bulk food storage, bulk food, long term food storage pantry, stocking up, cold room, food storage room, food storage ideas, food storage pantry, long term food storage ideas, food storage prepping, food storage containers, food storage organization, food storage tour, food storage for beginners, food storage hacks, food storage buckets, pantry tour homestead

Id: 9mo1XxND5CY

Length: 14min 43sec (883 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 19 2022