How to Store Shelf-Stable Foods
As people build their pantries, I get a lot of questions about how to store the excess. This is mostly an issue for people with more modest houses and apartments, but people with larger homes also may have this question. Storing food without it disrupting the flow of daily life, or being all over the place in an embarrassing mess, is really important! This article is going to focus a lot on generalities rather than specifics, since I don’t know all y’all’s lives or homes.
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Space: The First Frontier
I personally think this is the hardest step, because it really does require a frank and expansive understanding of where you live, how the space is used, and how much stuff you have. You also have to figure out what your priorities are, because this can affect how your space is used.
Some questions to ask yourselves:
How much space is there?
How is the space used by people and the things we own?
Is the space used efficiently, or are there some changes I can make to furniture arrangements or storage solutions that might help make it more efficiently used?
How much space to I even want to dedicate to food storage? How much food do I want to stockpile?
If my home is packed with stuff, is having some food storage worth potentially having to give something else up?
Are there creative ways I can use my space, such as putting things up on the walls, that can increase the usable space available to me for food stores?
There are lots more questions you can ask, but I think if you go through this as you wander around your home, you’ll know which follow-up questions are needed. Space is always the biggest question, though, no matter what kind of home you live in.
Me personally? I live in a shoebox, and I have a massive library. This actually is an issue in terms of food storage, because what is food storage if not an edible library? So I like to bother Ross to build me more and more shelves on the walls (with hooks on the bottoms for plants!) to put my books up there and free up floor space.
Now, I really don’t want to be stacking crates of foods where books used to live, so that mainly leaves that space available to me for… you guessed it! More books! But if you are one of those delightfully organized people who can keep up with making food storage look pretty in jars, you have more flexibility because you can make fill the bookshelves or the wall shelves with food!
I recommend keeping your spices less numerous than I do. I have a bookcase in my dining room for all my spices. It’s ridiculous, and I’ve been trying to thin it out, but it’s still an issue. I’d like to have one but one of the shelves in that case going to spices and the rest for all my pretty jars of fermented produce!
The point here is to really think about the space, and whether something in the way you use it needs to change to make your food storage life simpler. Consider options like under the bed storage bins and any unused space in your closet. Because of the library issue, under my bed and in my closet is where the majority of my dry goods go. I have 2 50-pound dog food bins in my closet for flours, and a number of under-the-bed bins for grains, pasta, and other sundries I like to store that won’t fit in the pantry.
I love rats, so long as they’re caged or in the wild. Not so much when they’re in my home. Phillip Jordan/Getty
Stop PESTering Me!
What about pests? There is no reason to store food if you aren’t going to protect it from those who want to take it from you. I’m not talking guns here, y’all. I’m talking about bugs, rats, and mice. Those are the real worry, not people.
The first thing you need to do with all your grains, flours, nuts, and pulses (beans, lentils, etc) is to freeze them. You can skate by on 3 days, but a week is ideal. If you don’t freeze them, you should expect that the eggs of various types of bugs (mostly weevils, but not exclusively) will hatch, grow into adults while they eat your food, and then lay new eggs. Endless repeating cycle of NOPE on that.
Freeze your stuff as step one of protecting it. As far as I’m concerned, this is the single most important thing to do. Technically, you can still eat infested grains and such, but if you eat too much of it, the feces of those bugs will make you sick. The bugs themselves are just added protein, but the feces are the issue. So just freeze your stuff.
Yes, I know. Some of you are like me, living in apartments or houses with regular refrigerators with tiny top freezers, this really can present an issue if you lean toward keeping the freezer full. You’ve got two options here: borrow space in someone else’s freezer, or make sure you don’t fill the freezer until the grains and such are done processing.
So you guys know, I do this with all dry goods, not just the grains. If I have a package of dried carrots, for example, it’s going in there. Why? Because warehouse critters tend to not discriminate, and this can happen with spices (different bugs than weevils), produce, all the things. If it’s for dry storage, it needs to spend its week in the freezer.
I also keep a quarantine section in my apartment for things that still need freezing. We’re all really familiar with in home quarantining now, so just pick whatever space you can and keep your unfrozen goods there until they’ve had their turn. If your freezer is small like mine, this is going to be a massive pain, and it’s going to take a while. If it’s giant, you should zip through it quickly!
Pro-tip: the bigger the parcel of food, the more time it needs. My 20# bags of rice go in for a week, but I might let a 1# bag of lentils skate by on 3-4 days.
Look at this little cutie! Not so cute when it’s eating your food, though. Ricky Kharawala/Getty
What about rats and mice? Yeah. This is a big ol’ ball of “fun.” In the last complex I lived in, someone decided that the smartest choice that could be made was to harangue the city into demolishing the little forest-y area adjacent to the complex. All the rats left the area when there was nowhere left for them to live, and they infested all 42 or 43 buildings in my complex.
You can imagine my anger. You can also imagine that I was prepared to not lose much food, because you also have to think about rodents when you’re thinking about food security and storage.
The facts are this: the only thing rodents can’t eventually get through are metal containers. Mostly no one is going to store their food in giant metal containers that can hold more substantive quantities of food, so we have to work downward from the ideal into what’s doable for us.
Thick plastic is going to be most doable. Those big dog food bins? Better if you get the hefty ones, but doable with the thinner plastic ones and also the under the bed bins. In the 2, I believe, months that I was killing rats (not always with traps, I’m horrified to say), none of my bins were affected. That cabbage I left on the counter one day? They had a good dinner that night. Flour dog food bins? Solid. Under the bed bins (even the one with a barely loose lid)? Solid.
If you have a “go bag” or however many of them, you need to secure the food in there better. It took me a couple of weeks to figure out that the food they were able to access actually came from Ross’ go bag. The rats cleared out of my unit pretty quickly once I found their source of food. My neighbors did not fare as well, and it was so bad for one of them that she moved. I don’t blame her. There were massive holes chewed in many of her walls from the rats, and they really were stealing all her food.
So you know, a fully grown rat only needs to chew a hole the size of a quarter to get through. I believe it’s dime sized for mice.
Please forgive me for the nightmares y’all may have tonight. But you’re welcome for the nightmares you won’t have if you listened to me about pest avoidance. Also sorry for what I’m about to say next. Brett Jordan/Getty
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Rotational Systems
I’m sorry about this too, y’all, but it needs to happen. You have to follow the grocery stores’ and restaurants’ lead and rotate according to the “first in, first out” principle.
This basically means that in the beginning, this will be no big deal, but as your stores grow, it becomes a big deal. Mostly with canned goods (rat proof!). When you buy something new, it has to go to the back of the line or bottom of the pile. That way, the oldest stuff gets used first. Beans, admittedly, you can be less strict about, because beans never expire. They may take longer to cook when they’re old, but they can still be cooked. I’ve cooked 10-year old beans before and they tasted fine. Ideally, you won’t have the same beans for 10 years, but I once had misplaced some that I found later, and then later when I found them, I didn’t eat them first.
But pretty much everything else really must follow that rule. First in, first out. Say it with me. If you have a lot of cans, you may wish to say it as you’re pulling them out of the pantry to add the new ones to the back as a mantra.
These days, I’ve gotten “lazy” and keep 12-18 months of food in my apartment (I used to keep 2-3 years), even with all the plants, 3 humans, a rabbit, my library, and Linus the Foster Cat. So you really can make this work, and especially if you’re not storing that much food. All of this is, of course, easier said than done if you’re new to this (as most people are), but I believe in y’all. You’ve got this!
I’m finishing with a video, because videos can be helpful. YouTube didn’t exist when I started doing this, so I was surprised by the number of videos there were, even for apartment dwellers. They mostly all seem to say the same stuff as above (albeit differently, and with more detail), and also seem to love under-the-bed storage too.
