Using Mylar Bags for Food Storage

Hi it's Jaime from Guildbrook Farm here to talk about mylar bags. I'm going to tell you what I use them for, why use them and what type that I buy. Mylar bags are foil packets that are used for long-term food preservation so food preservation longer than a year and what they do is they help to protect against moisture from damaging your food from bugs from hatching and also from nutrient loss so the opacity of the bags that helps prevent sunlight from coming in and destroying a vitamins such as vitamin A and vitamin C there are several types of mylar bags this is a one-gallon mylar bag that has a ziplock on it for if you open it up and you just want to store it on your shelf and this is a 5-gallon mylar bag that does not have a ziplock these are reusable once you use them once you open them up you can save the bags and then reseal them and i have several here that's probably going to use again these ones has the ziplock on them because i can't iron over the ziplock I'll probably just cut this part off and then I'll seal right here and then as i continue to use these bags I'll cut the part off that i use and keep working my way down until it's just impractical to use this bag anymore when it comes to buying mylar bags it doesn't matter what style you buy but what is really important is the thickness of the bag i would not go with anything less than a five mil bags the reason for that is because anything thinner than us if you hold it up to the light you can see through it and that's what's going to cause your nutrient loss so whatever style mylar bag buy make sure you always get at least five mil now mylar bags are used in conjunction in most cases they're using conjunction with what's called an oxygen absorber these are thrown into the bag and they remove the oxygen oxygen is what causes well first of all moisture but also causes bugs the hatch or it allows bugs to hatch by removing that oxygen you decrease your chance of bugs hatching yes they can still hatch but it will definitely decrease your chances of bugs hatching. When it comes to bugs whether you like it or not all your food contains bugs. Canned mushrooms have a certain percentage of maggots that they're allowed per can your potato chips that you eat all kinds of bug parts that are allowed in each bag of potato chips and when it comes to things like flours and grains they are allowed a certain percentage of not only rat feces, mouse feces and bug parts but also eggs which can hatch. Now typically these don't really hatch within a year but given the right conditions it's possible that can and for that that's the reason why you want you use a mylar bag removing the oxygen prevents them from hatching. So what I have here and I just picked up some bulk food I have 50 pounds of gluten-free rolled oats and I have 75 pounds of Navy beans now if I were going to use this within the course of a year would not need to use mylar bags but because i already have some oats that I'm working through right now and it's possible well actually both of these it's possible that they're going to last longer than a year i'm going to not take any chances and i'm going to preserve them in mylar bags. Now there are other options if you don't want to use mylar bags for protection against food for short term bug protection you can throw some bay leaves into your your food which helps deter bugs some people use diatomaceous earth by mixing it in their food which which I do not do and for long-term bug protection some people freeze their food one option might be to put your food outside on three days when it's freezing you have to freeze the food for at least 3 days in order to kill most bugs and then again using the mylar bags with the oxygen absorber now there are some foods that you cannot use oxygen absorbers on those would be such as your oily foods such as nuts and your sugars if you put an oxygen absorber in with sugar it'll turn it hard as a brick and it'll give it a weird taste so if you're storing sugar you can store it in the mylar bag but you cannot use the oxygen absorber for that. Now oyxgen absorbers come in several different sizes this is a 2000cc and this is the 500cc I have some believe these are 100 in the jar the size of your oxygen absorber is dependent on the size of your bag and what you're storing so items that are maybe more dense like your grain would require less oxygen absorbers items like your beans which have a lot of air because they're not as dense would require more oxygen absorbers there are a lot of charts online and tell you what size oxygen absorber to use with what size bag and what type of product the one that I use is US Emergency Supply it has a really good site that tells you what size oxygen absorber to use for what size bag and for what product ok so let's get started we're going to bag these up now one thing when it comes to oxygen absorbers soon as I open this bag these things are going to start sucking up oxygen you can tell from the little eye that is pink that these are good to go once this eye turn blue these oxygen absorbers are no longer good any more now it's very possible that i will not use all these oxygen absorbers for all the products that i have here if that's the case one thing you can do is you can throw them very very quickly into a mason jar pop the lid on real quick and they will seal so these you can see the eye is still pink I threw that in there it will probably good for another use if you have any extras you can do that with that ok so normally when filling up a 5-gallon mylar bag we would stick this inside of a five-gallon bucket and the 5 gallon bucket would offer some support for the bag but I am fresh out of 5 gallon buckets so we're going to see if we can make this work by propping it up in here because this is where my store them until I get more five-gallon buckets alright we're gonna start scoopin you're going to want to shake these down get out as much air as possible in packing that way your oxygen absorbers have less work to do this bag isn't quite as full as this bag In order to reduce the amount of oxygen in here I'm going to trim some off the top again the least amount of empty space you have the better chance of the oxygen absorbers have to work so we're just going to trim a little bit off alright let's do our beans I'm going to start off by recycling some of these old bags and I'm going to cut off the ziplock so that there is room to seal the bags So just to show you here is a new bag you can see there's room appear above the ziplock to seal the bag but because these are already used that cut that part off so in order to have room to seal it I need to cut off the ziplock. So the ziplock is really only good for one time use. so I actually forgot i have some half gallon bags so the smaller ones are the half gallon bags, these are the one gallons and these are my five gallon bags so in order to tell you what size CC oxygen absorber I need you want to look at a chart like this US Emergency Supply and you can see where they have the container type the type of food was a wheat flour grain or rice or whether it's pasta or beans which are less dense. And these top ones are for buckets you want to go down here to the mylar bag so the five-gallon mylar bags are going to require about 2000cc for my oats for the one gallons over here beans we need about a thousand for my half-gallon we also need a thousand so a thousand in the small ones and 2000 in the big ones, two thousand in the big ones. Ok so I have 500 CC oxygen absorbers here these bags all require a thousand so will put two in each one of these bags and the five gallons requires 2000cc so we're gonna put four oxygen absorbers in these bags before we open this bag up, we have to do is really quickly because these are going to start absorbing oxygen i need to have a jar ready with a lid so if there's any leftover i'm going to throw this jar and put the lid on super quick and we have to have irons now what's going to seal these bags is going to be an iron. They make irons specifically for mylar bags but you can use a regular old clothes iron or one of our viewers suggested using a flat iron and since we don't use this puppy anymore, might as well put it to some good use so we're going to give it a try this time ok so this is going to be really super quick, let's get started That sealed up pretty nice. It helps if you have a partner but mine is a little busy right now This actually works really well. It's a whole lot better than you have to use a clothes iron With a clothes iron, you would have to lay this down something flat we have boards here in case this didn't work and it works really well and one thing to note i have this iron set on 350 degrees and it seems to seal pretty well we did do a little test before we got started you're going to want to make sure that you test it so that it's not too hot and doesn't melt the bag and also that it's hot enough another thing I got so excited showing you guys how to do these bags that i forgot to write what they were on the bags usually I write it before I write out what the product is before I fill the bag so i got like one mystery bag over here. It ought to be interesting to see what that is we open it up they're going to be navy beans or pinto beans That works rather nice if you had to use the iron you would need a board like this and you have to fold it down over this and then use the iron on it. I actually like this a lot better and really glad that we got this suggested to us. This works fantastic like I said now i have to write the names of what these are before you pack your bags write what it is and write the date on it. it's a lot easier than writing it on afterwards because you don't know what's what these are Pinto supposedly and these are navy ok so now all of the bags were sealed and labeled properly after about 24 hours to up to about a week it's going to take that long for the oxygen to be removed from the bags you'll start to notice that the bags shrink up like this and most cases but in some cases like in this quinoa bag, it still looks like there's air in there and there in there in there because the oxygen absorbers remove the oxygen not the air so there's still nitrogen in there and it's very possible that they can look a little loose like this but it doesn't mean those bad it's okay now how long do these last people have reported that mylar bags can be stored for up to 40 years or longer really as long as you open it up and there's no bugs in it and it looks good and smells good you can eat it now what do we do with these bag now well these should not be stored on a shelf just like this because it's very easy for a mouse or rodent to eat through this bag they should be stored in some sort of bucket or container you don't need to use a food-grade bucket if these are already in food grade mylar bags you can just get into any bucket. For our oats, I ran out of 5 gallon bucket so I'm just going to store it right here in this plastic bin with a lid on it and for my beans i have the same buckets but a little bit smaller that i'm going to store them in so again mylar bags they're really good for dried goods such as pasta, whole grains anything along that line cereals not so good for things like sugar or anything that has a moisture content. don't want to store anything probably like chocolate coffee would be a good thing to store in these kinds of bags and they're good for up to forty years you don't need to use mylar bags if you're storing for under a year unless you're really concerned about bugs or moisture or any kind of nutrient loss really that's not gonna be an issue in under a year so if you guys wanted to know how to do it there you go you guys currently use mylar bags and have any tips or tricks i'm not an expert on this stuff, this is just what i do you guys out there I'm sure a lot of you guys are the experts on the stuff feel free to leave a comment below if you have any tips or tricks on this kind of thing and if you have any questions or comments leave those below as well if I will have the answer, I'm sure somebody else does if you like this kind of stuff like subscribe have a lot more videos coming out on prepping, on food storage on stretching your meat with different kinds of sauces and different kind ofrecipes a lot of different things coming out and we'll look forward to seeing you on the next video Thanks for watching chickens want nothing to do inside their head

Channel: Guildbrook Farm

Views: 337,245

Rating: 4.9637904 out of 5

Keywords: mylar, mylar bags, prepping, food storage, long term food storage, preparedness, prepper, food pantry, oxygen absorbers, mylar bag sealer, vacuum seal bags, survival food, emergency food, emergency food supply, emergency food storage, preppers, preppers supplies, prepper supplies, prepping supplies, preppers guide, shtf, what is prep, prepper food, prepping food, preppers list, best survival food, survival food storage, how to build a pantry, long lasting food

Id: 7rC80DafNWs

Length: 18min 40sec (1120 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 15 2017