Food Storage Rice

Rice is an iconic food for long-term storage, and studies have shown that it remains good for a long time.  In the BYU study, samples had 88%+ acceptability for emergency use at 30 years, but the acceptability for everyday use was lower:  regular white rice held around 70% over the time frame studied, but parboiled rice was about 10% lower (the poster is viewable here).  Thirty years is certainly very good for stored food.

Storing bulk foods for more than a short time is best done in an oxygen-free environment.  That can be accomplished with buckets, oxygen absorbers and mylar, or half-gallon mason jars (with oxygen absorbers and/or a Food Saver vacuum sealer).  Mason jars are exposed to light (although Ball has offered amber mason jars recently that block almost all of the light).  Mason jars can be re-vacuum-sealed, but this isn't very doable with mylar.

A long time ago--about 2009--I put up some jasmine rice in mason jars. I decided to open one up to see how it was faring.

The results were very decent*.  I didn't perceive any staleness or rancidity (brown rice does this almost immediately, and even white rice can taste a little off after a few months when not well-stored).  I'll finish the jar.  In the picture above, the jar looks a little cloudy; that's just starch.  When the jar is finished, it'll clean up easily.

*I like jasmine rice for everyday use, but this 13+ year-old rice had lost its floral essence and tasted like normal white rice.  So while the rice lived on, the flavor that makes jasmine different was gone.

With food inflation, it makes sense to front-load food purchases even if there's no interest in building an inventory.  Packaging has to be considered, but it can still represent a savings over buying food as it is needed.

The Great Freeze of 2022

 The Christmas weekend Siberian Express dropped morning lows to single digits where I am (6 and 8 on two different mornings, plus daytime highs in the 20s for a couple of days).  My animal housing is not particularly robust against cold.  The chicken tractor design  that I used (based on Justin Rhodes' plans) is open in the front, and my rabbit hutch is very open: again, the emphasis in the design is on keeping them cool, not warm.

If it routinely got this cold--particularly with wind--I'd have the rabbits in an open shed, probably, where tarps could easily be draped across the front to block the wind.  And the chickens would probably have a coop they could be closed up in.

As it was, all of the animals made it through okay.  Everyone's water froze repeatedly.

On the coldest day, even the water I put out mid-morning froze by afternoon.  So I kept swapping out crocks for the rabbits and waterers for the chickens.  After the first couple of days, the highs started going back above freezing again and the daytime water wouldn't freeze.

None of the animals exhibited any distress; all behaved pretty normally.  No frostbite on the rabbits' ears, although the roosters had a touch of frostbite on their combs (note the last two spikes in the picture below).

I was able to keep the house habitable with the wood stove, but it struggled to warm it up the first morning (the storm blew in early morning on a Friday, and Saturday morning was the six-degree low). The house was in the upper 40s Saturday morning, and the stove took most of the day to get it warmed up into the normal range.  Fortunately, I was able to be home to tend it. 

I'm glad it's not routinely like this.