Food Storage

[FEISTY]

I'm no expert, but may I stress how important it is to be careful with dry food stores. Gruesome as it sounds and no matter how clean you keep everything, you can import those tiny little beasties you see in flour, etc really easily (tiny eggs you just will not see). If you're not using stuff all the time, you can easily open your flour packet and find them having a field day. Once they're in, they'll migrate to ANYTHING dry - porage, sugar, etc, etc - and then the work begins. You have to throw EVERYTHING away and scrub every surface, nook and cranny with bleach. I remember we had them once when I was wee and then we got them a couple of years ago. It's something I never want repeated, so now I freeze everything. Rice, flour, cornflour, sugar, porage oats, lentils - everything goes in the freezer for a couple of days before I store it. In fact, some of the stuff never makes it out of the freezer before it gets used. I'm only saying this as people are investing so much cash in dry stores. It would be heart breaking to have to ditch them. I also use those glass jars now for storage as the wee blighters can't get in. Will only be buying bulk bags of dry stuff when I know exactly where I'm going to keep them. My future plan is freezing and then decanting into mylar bags with moisture sachets stored in large plastic containers. I hope this helps someone avoid huge disappointment and setback. My reaction might have been a bit extreme, but it cost us £20K for a new kitchen !

[nickdutch]

Can people recommend what foods I should be prepping with if short on space. How do you work out how much is needed or shall I just try to save as much as possible. Also obviously when something has a best before date but no use by date, can I take it that there is no use by fate as long as it is stored well?
Thanks

I have taken to stacking my cheap tins in a corner fo my bedroom that no-one but me goes anywhere near. I keep the extra lentils there too and it works nicely.

Cheap tesco value (sorry... "everyday value".... naughty me... slap on wrist...) tinned potatoes are pretty space economical for the calories they pack. Also those 5 - 6 Kg bags of basmati rice from the supermarket can be layered flat, one on top of the other somewhere convenient (top of the kitchen cupboards or under the bed maybe?), same with the 2Kg bags of red split lentils and other lentils.

[poppypiesdad]

Question. If you store them in a nitrogen environment, will that stop them ?

J

[2ndRateMind]

I've always gone on the principle of "store what you eat, eat what you store" i.e. if we don't normally eat it we don't store it, and we've always rotated it so nothing is that old...

This is exactly right. Storage should be an extension of your larder. So, prepping just involves a bigger larder than most people keep; say, 1 month's/3 month's/1 year's worth of food rather than 1 week's worth. And, it makes sense to use the oldest stuff first, even if that involves scrabbling amongst tins and packets to find out which particular one that is... I know this is obvious to all you experienced preppers, but for newbies, it bears repeating.

Cheers, 2RM

[lonewolf]

keep it rotated, use oldest first, new last and you wont have to worry about dates.

[FEISTY]

keep it rotated, use oldest first, new last and you wont have to worry about dates.

Think I might have mentioned this before, but I set up a basic table on Word with the BBE date as the first column. Every time I add something new, I re-order that column by date with soonest date first. You can see automatically what needs to be used. As time goes by and my stores increase, I'll add in a column giving its location. You can also re-order the items alphabetically (eg Beans (Baked), Beans (Kidney), Fruit (Mandarin), Fruit (Peaches), Soup (Tomato), ...) and then you can search for stuff you want. If you print it out both ways and keep it in your SHTF folder, it'll always be up-to-date and available (you might not be able to check the computer). I find the Word tables much easier to use for something basic like this than a database. Today, I'll be adding in the water purifying tablets which arrived earlier .

Aside from this, I got hold of the old knarled, last-in-town Aloe Vera plant yesterday. I've taken off the big old droopy "leaves" and scraped the gel into a container, which is now marked up and in the fridge. Apparently, it keeps for 6 months (we'll see), so hopefully, that's any sunburn taken care of. The large plant doesn't have any babies, so I've also put a couple of "leaves" into water, but I'm not so hopeful of them rooting (has anyone done this?). The much smaller and manageable plant is now watered and placed into a lovely purple planter, in the hope it will go forth and multiply . If not, it's still a perfect supply of gel. Heirloom Squash seeds in propagater on windowsill (that's the only problem with seed sowing time - the clutter!). Also very exotic looking hot peppers. Flowers too, but you can't eat those . Spent a good bit of the morning scrubbing out pots and trays I should have done months ago (too easy to just pile them up in a corner and forget about them). So much to do, so little time - weeds growing already .

[izzy_mack]

I keep boxes of food on the "landing", the only space in the house, not ideal but you have to do what you can. I keep a supply in the kitchen for using and replace from stock as needed then buy more to replace the stock. To help rotate from a place not easy to work in, when I buy new stuff, tins especially, I use a permanent marker to put the bb date on in easy to read letters before storing, saves peering at it in poor light in awkward corners.