Whether you have a small garden or a farm or maybe you live in a city or suburb there are advantages to building a pantry of foods that can last a long time without refrigeration. The fact that the food is stored without refrigeration is important because you don’t want to be worrying about a large amount of food if your power goes out.
The easiest way to begin building your pantry is by purchasing items at the store that have a long shelf life in the packaging that they come in. Commercial processing of food is a highly technical and monitored process. Items that come in cans, mylar bags and sealed plastic bags will have their best by date stamped on the package. This does not 100% guarantee that if you open a can of tomatoes that normally have a 2 year shelf life that they will be good but it does give you a good chance that they will last that long and they will last in a way that they are still reasonably similar to fresh canned product.
Understanding the Expires By and Best By Dates is very important. Best By Dates are dates where the manufacturer has tested that the process they use will allow the product to last in good condition. This is important for many foods and you will find that some foods have very long Best By Dates and others have a much shorter shelf life. This does not mean that the product will go bad one day after the Best By Date it means that the manufacture has decided that this is the storage limit that they suggest for good quality.
To better understand best by and expiration dates for products you can check the USDA website for more information on the specific food that you want to store for extended time.
What Types Of Food Can Be Stored Without Refrigeration For Long Periods Of Time?
Most foods if processed correctly can have a very long storage time without refrigeration. Think about it today you can even buy bacon in the unrefrigerated section of your supermarket but many other products can be stored that we don’t really think about. Animal Products can be stored in Cans like: Tuna, Chunk Chicken, Crab, Oysters, Salmon, Hotdogs, Ham are just a few things that we don’t always think about. Vegetable and Fruit Products are much easier to store for longer periods of time Tomatoes in a variety of forms from whole to puree sauce, Corn, Beans, Peaches and other Fruits all come in Cans that are easy to store.
You can purchase Powdered or Canned Condensed Milk, Processed Cheese like Velveeta, Dried Rice and Beans, Potato Flakes, Noodles, and you can even purchase ready to make meals that just require hot water or cooking.
The variety of foods that are available for purchase are very extensive but they can also be expensive.
If you have a small garden or if you are willing to process your own food then you can process your own food for long term storage at a much lower cost.
Water Bath and Pressure Canning Foods For Storage
Water Bath and Pressure Canning has been a staple of food preserving for an extremely long time. If you live on a homestead or farm or even your grandmother might remember canning food to preserve it while living in the City. Before refrigeration was available cheaply for everyone the ability to preserve food for a year or longer in vacuum packed canning jars was something that most families knew how to do.
Now there are differences between what you might be able to process at home and what a factory can safely can. Meats, Fish and any type of animal product really makes processing safely a difficult thing. For any Animal Products you will need to use a pressure caner which can be intimidating for many people. It also means your stove needs to be able to heat the large pot full of water and food for a long period of time and this is not easy on some stoves. Glass Top or Induction Stoves won’t work but you could buy a propane stove like the ones for frying whole turkey’s that will easily do the work for you and you will be working outside so it might be a safety advantage. In actuality pressure cookers very rarely fail if they are taken care of. The USDA has extension offices in almost every county where you can bring your Pressure Caner for testing for free.
Tomatoes, Pickles and other vegetables can be water bath caned. This only requires that you heat the jars full of food in a pot full of water on your stove. It can take some time to process the food and it might be difficult to get a very large pot of water up to boil on your stove but you can work in small batches of 1 to 3 quarts or even pints of food you want to preserve.
Many favorites can be stored for a year or more but if you are processing meats / animal products or some vegetables then you will need to cook them when you remove them from the jars just to ensure there are no bacteria that could make you sick.
High Acid items like Pickles are normally not a problem and they are a great way to learn canning.
Ball Company is the largest maker of Canning Jars and other Products. They have a long history of being a primary source for recipes that have been tested. The USDA is another source of Safe Recipes for Canning.
NEVER USE A RECIPE THAT HAS NOT BEEN CHECKED BY A RELIABLE SOURCE LIKE THE ABOVE 2 SOURCES.
And never alter a recipe unless the directions say you can.
This is just one of the things you will have to live with if you want to can your food safely.
Something as simple as Pumpkin can not be canned safely at home and once you have been canning for a while you will understand why. So, if you want pumpkin then buy cans of it at the store or freeze it.
Dehydrating Food For Long Term Storage
Dehydrating food goes back thousands of years. Drying Fish or making Jerky of meat, Drying beans, fruits or other food for long term storage is very common. Although I have personal concerns about the safety of preserving animal products through this process I admit people have been doing it forever. However I am not going to talk about it because it seems risky to me. I have friends that hunt that do it but for some reason its not going to be something I ever do.
Dehydrated fruit and vegetables are relatively easy to process. Things like dried tomatoes, Fruit that is in trail mix, Fruit Rollups and other things like this are very easy to make with a cheap $20 dehydrator.
Another thing is herbs that are often small enough to be dried on a counter top on a piece of parchment paper. I do this with green onions by chopping 1/8th inch rings of the green part and letting it dry for a few days on my countertop and then store it in a parmigiana cheese shaker container for later use. Its so extremely easy to do any time you pickup green onions or grow them. I have had bad luck with some things like mint but normally it is the oils that are extracted and saved from mint.
Final Note
Whether you are buying pre canned or packaged food, Buying food and then preparing it for storage or growing the food and then storing it yourself there are many ways to store a very large variety of foods for a relatively long period of time.
If you want to get into freeze drying then normally that is very expensive and a group of homesteaders might group together and share a machine. If not then it is something best left to a commercial processor. However it does give you much longer storage times of many years.
Always understand your limits on storing foods.
You never want to risk getting sick because you opened a $1 jar of food that was bad and ate it. The cost at the emergency room will be much higher and you can even risk death. So know what you are doing before you do it.
Remember commercial processors have scientists that work for them and recipes that have been tested and man inspection processes that the home processor can not even come close to reproducing.
With that in mind there are a ton of ways you can preserve your own food safely if you follow the guides and instructions of experts.
For more info visit Ball www.freshpreserving.com
and he USDA https://nchfp.uga.edu/publications/publications_usda.html