interesting info on food storage including grains, flours etc

Hi Susie,

That's a nice website! Unfortunately for me, Idaho is a long way from where I live, but I found the storage information helpful.

I love spelt flour, and since reading Daniel Leader's Bread Alone have leaned toward organic and stoneground, when I can find it. I discovered 2 relatively local (small) millers who grind my whole organic spelt and whole organic rye. While these flours cost a bit more than the flour from a big company, the stoneground organic flour is so fresh, and since I don't use tons of these flours (I add them to my bread flour and AP), I find this worthwhile.

Where do you live? Are there any millers within a reasonable distance to you? The smaller millers are harder to find, because search engines like size, but I would keep looking.

David

Living in the Alaskan Interior, keeping in mind that we are about 400 miles north of Anchorage (main food depot from the Lower 48) and that 90% of our supplies come through a single point, the Port of Tacoma, in Washington, we are "into food storage" around here.  As a mandatory minimum, it's irresponsible (my opinion) to have less than a couple of week's worth of food stored and a better idea to have 6+ weeks stored.  We personally have 6+ months worth of food stored, and that's for a family of 6.  This of course means that we have grain (wheat, barley), beans, rice, soup mixes, flour, etcetera stored for the long term.  So much for background (and no, we're not LDS types, just Alaskans.)

With any natural dried product such as grain, rice, or beans (etc) you will always have pests.  It's unavoidable.  They may exist only as tiny eggs that may hatch some day while in storage, or they may be larvae or adults.  Either way, if you are going to store these types of foods for more than a couple of weeks, maybe 3 or 4, then you should take precautions to kill the pests that are inevitably there.  The good news is that it only takes a 10% CO2 atmosphere (for about 2 or 3 days) to kill them all, the eggs, the larvae, and the adults.  BTW, those little oxygen absorbers just don't answer when it comes to food preparation in volumes larger than a couple of cups ...look up how much oxygen they absorb by volume, compare that to your storage containers, then calculate how much absorbant you would need ...it's a crazy large amount.  It's better to displace the oxygen with CO2.  We either buy iron-able mylar bags (seal with a household iron) or just use food-grade 6-gallon buckets with sealing lids designed for (decades) long term storage.  Note that with the mylar bags, they are gas-proof and moisture-proof, but not puncture proof.  To displace oxygen and kill the critters that may or may not be in there, you put 2 ounces of dry ice (frozen CO2) in the bottom of the bucket, lay a paper towel over it, then pour in your food item to within about 2" of the top.  Use a mallet to put the lid about halfway on, allowing one edge to remain loose.  Within about 3 hours, the dry ice will have completely converted to CO2 gas, producing far more than the bucket can hold, and will have displaced the oxygen (air) in the bucket.  With the mylar bags, you place them in a bucket, follow the same dry ice and filling technique, then seal them, then leave the bag in the bucket and put the lid on.  Mylar is gas- and water-proof, but not puncture proof, so it needs to be stored in the buckets (or other countainer ...even a laundry basket with a lid that gets taped on.)  The resulting CO2 concentration is typically in the 70% to 90% range, far higher than necessary.  You feel the bottom of the bucket for cold spots and when all is warm, you use the mallet to finish popping the lid on.  After several hours, you'll notice that the lid will have a hollow to it, sort of like the lids on canning jars after they cool.  This means the food product (grain, beans, flour etc) has absorbed CO2 gas and thereby reduced the amount of atmosphere in the bucket, and now really pulls that lid on tight.  Label it for contents, amount, and date, and put it away.  Grains and rice will last for many decades like this, bug-free, and white flour will last many months.  We don't store whole-anything flours, but store the dried wheat or barley kernels instead ...and we own a Country Living Grain Mill that turns them into fine flour when we need it.

Hope this helps someone.

Brian

PS: If you are doing your storage in a cold region during the winter, and outdoor storage area will usually kill larvae and adults, but may not kill eggs.  I still recommend the CO2 method. 

PPS: We get our dry ice from Arctic Fire & Safety in Fairbanks, AK, but in most locations, dry ice will be available from welding shops and places that ship frozen goods.  The buckets come from the Alaska Feed Company in Fairbanks, a feed-and-seed kind of place (with some human food too).  Your local feed-n-seed place, or Latter Day Saints supply warehouse may have them as well ...but many LDS sites don't let non-members buy things (like us ...we have to go elsewhere.)  For buckets that we open and use more often, not our long-term storage, we use Gamma Seal lids on them.