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.

Bread-More Thrills of Victory and Agonies of Defeat

 Cold temps require heat-assisted proofing, but also generally provide for the potential for dramatic oven spring.  The oven proofing also has the potential to cause uneven gas pockets in the dough. However, sometimes cold-temp bread turns out great.  A couple of weeks ago, I baked a 100% red whole wheat loaf that turned out like this:

And once cut open, it was nice:

It was still denser than white or 50/50 bread, but whole wheat doesn't turn out much better than this (at least not for me).

As I often do, I followed the 100% whole wheat loaf with a 100% white loaf the next week.  I had visions of airy perfection. What I got was...disappointing.

It's worse than it looks in the picture.  Cut open, it's approaching unleavened status.

That may be a bit harsh, but only a bit.  The (minimal) rise was very uneven.  It looks like Swiss Cheese--big gas pockets and solid otherwise. I'm not sure what happened.  Conditions for the two loaves seemed pretty similar: a cold house, followed by oven proofing for a few hours, then baking.  There are obviously things about bread baking that I still haven't figured out.

Oxygen Absorbers

 As noted previously, sometimes bad things happen with stored food over time.  Food in a sealed container that has oxygen in it, as well, can suffer from infestation and oxidation / deterioration. Freezer burn is another example of this.  So it is best when storing things for more than a short time to vacate the oxygen.

Food Saver-style vacuum sealers do this, and there are also jar attachments for wide mouth and regular mouth canning jars.  I don't know offhand what concentration of oxygen they can reduce the interior of a jar to, but they're a decent approach. They may not drop it enough to prevent insect eggs from hatching.

Another approach is to use oxygen absorbers. They are sold in various sizes to accommodate different containers.  US Emergency Supply has a very useful chart on this. In addition to canning jars, mylar bags and buckets can be used (the bags do not need to be kept in a bucket, but a bucket needs a bag in order to store food--BYU researchers found that oxygen levels could not be reliably maintained at a low enough level using a bucket alone, probably because of seal leakage).

There are plenty of resources online showing the use of mylar bags.  In addition to oxygen absorbers, dry ice can be used to drive out the oxygen.  That's a more old-school approach that fills the container with CO2 rather than sucking the oxygen out of the air and into the iron powder in the absorber.  The Rose Red Homestead has a video that demonstrates both approaches.

When exposed to air, oxygen absorbers begin to react.  It does not necessarily happen very fast, but it does happen: so opening a package of them doesn't render them all useless within two minutes unless sealed back up, but they do need to be put in either their final destination or in another airtight container quickly (a canning jar that is then vacuum-sealed is ideal).

Some oxygen absorber packages have an oxygen indicator:

The Oxyeye is pink when it hasn't been exposed to oxygen, and it soon turns purple after opening the package (or after the package leaks and allows the concentration inside to exceed 0.05%).

One caveat is that in time, the indicator will turn a faded pink, looking almost like it did when unexposed:

The above indicator is a few months old; I just clipped it to the refrigerator to see what would happen.

A usable oxygen indicator will feel like a pillow stuffed with powder, which it is when it's in its unexposed state. If it feels rigid and crumbly, it's probably no longer able to absorb oxygen.  Some vendors repackage absorbers into smaller quantities.  The repackaged absorbers are quite likely to be at least partially depleted in this process, and may be completely ruined. While some oxygen reduction is better than none, levels have to drop below one percent to prevent insect eggs from hatching.  With functioning absorbers and mylar bags, this is achievable.

The above picture shows some pinto beans, packed into gallon-sized mylar bags (five pounds in each). After a day, a noticeable vacuum effect has sucked the package down around the contents as the oxygen has been removed.

After my infestation episode, I'm trying to put my wheat into mylar, even though wheat doesn't necessarily need oxygen-free storage for quality purposes over a relatively short time frame. Hopefully the day of weevils will not be repeated.

Black Walnuts, 2022

 In 2020 I had a bumper crop of black walnuts.  In 2021, I had hardly any.  I was expecting an alternate-bearing bigger harvest this year, and the trees did not disappoint.

I've been doing them one five-gallon bucket at a time; this is a manageable amount that takes me about an hour to process start to finish.  A full bucket yields very little once the hulls are knocked off.

After washing, they get arrayed in the sun to dry:

Now it's just a matter of cracking them...

The Arrival of Fall

 Fall is here.  There's a pretty serious drought going on (stage 2, heading toward stage 3), so leaves are dropping early, and some color started earlier than normal.  However, plants need less water as they're going dormant, so hopefully the long-term damage will be limited.  I've been watering trees and plants for over a month (during which time I've only gotten 1/8" of rain).

My paw paws have never produced. They've been in the ground for a while now and I keep hoping I'll see blooms in the spring.  Maybe next year.  This year they turned a nicer shade of yellow than I think I have previously seen (the above picture was taken about a week ago; the tree is leafless now after a couple of hard freezes).

The muscadine vines are now fully turned; the picture below was taken a couple of weeks ago as they were midway.  The vertical orange leaves in the background are poison ivy.

 

Now begins a brief four-month window of complete dormancy to get things done.  Spring is just around the corner.

Fall Bread

 With my sourdough starter, I get optimal rise in the dough (aka sponge) at about 75 degrees.  Above 80 the rise is explosive, and letting it sit on the counter for 7 or 8 hours leads to big prebake rise, sub-optimal rise while baking.  In the colder months, I have the opposite problem.  My dough doesn't rise much at all, so needs an oven proof session of about two hours.

This fall has yielded a rapid transition from warm (> 80 indoors) to cool (barely 70).  I baked one loaf that turned out great before I had to go back to oven-proofing.

Obviously, in the summer I could switch to a daytime rise, when I could control the time a little better than when it rises overnight.  But that would be disruptive to other things in the routine. So overnight rise it is.  That will work well for the next few months.