What else besides rice, beans, flour, corn meal and powdered milk can make a good candidate for storing in 5 gallon buckets with O2 absorbers?
I have enough of those items for about 6 buckets, but have 10 buckets total along with 10 mylar bags and O2 absorbers.  Need some ideas on what to put in the other 4.

Oats, Sugar, baking powder, Salt, - maybe yeast? or without the bags and absorbers - honey.

I was thinking about salt or sugar maybe, but wont those stay good just as well in their original containers and maybe placed in a plastic tote?

Not too sure, I am a rookie in all of this.

I would not trust anything that wasn't sealed for longer term, If the ambient humidity gets to it, it will turn into a brick, (sugar and salt)

I am planning on doing some oats cut and uncut.
Rice variety is also nice, Brown, white, Jasmine, and other varieties make for a change of pace.

Pasta.

Along the pasta line, I was considering mac & cheese by the case, and put up several of them in a large plastic tote.
Hmm, on 2nd thought, that might keep the bugs out, but not really the air, which is what would make them go stale or bad.

pasta

grits

coffee beans or grounds

drink mixes ( tang etc)

spices

ammo

TP





just a few off the top of my head that ive put away besides the standard stuf ( beans,lentils,wheat etc)

We put up a lot of elbow macaroni in gallon size Mylar bags. We also have a couple cans of cheese powder.  From a price standpoint, I think this is the better option.

We have recently rolled over to cheese powder and our own maccaroni for mac and cheese, it saves you a fortune if it is eaten often. I agree on sealing everything if your looking at long term. I had a 5 gallon bucket that I used to just fill with a 25 lb bags of sugar. No problems the first year, rotated thru it fast enough that I had no problems. Year 2 rolls around and I got to get some out, and it is a big rock. I lucked out and it broke up pretty good, but now I get chunky sugar till it gets used up.

Do you have a grinder yet? This might be a great time to make a grinder purchase, and get several buckets of grains to get you into that game, so to speak. Then you could start doing all your own flours and cereals, even pasta for that matter.  That is the next step for us, and I'm looking forward to going home made on all of those products. Once you have to make all your own refined carbs, you find that you eat a lot less of them, which is good for now for me and the missus. By using the buckets you have, you could get half a dozen different grains, and go to town.

Rolled oats, Spahgetti, sugar, honey is a great one, but I would purchase the sealed 5 gallon bucket rather than make my own. A buddy has taken 8 5 gallon buckets, and turned them into his bug out kit for food. Between the 8 buckets, his estimates give him about 2 months worth of food for him and his wife, as well as a ew vitals other things, like toilet paper, dental hygene, etc.

+1

elbow mac.

You may need to put an extra O2 absorber in there though. elbow mac has a lot of air space inside.

i put my entire bucket water filtration system inside of one, along with several bottles of water.

Don't use O2 absorbers with sugar. Most of the time sugar turns hard in long term storage and can still be used if you chop it up. But if you use O2 absorbers, it will likely take so much out of the sugar that it will be pretty much useless.

I have had terrible, terrible luck with ANY cardboard-boxed processed rice or pasta product.  Every single one of them weevils out.

I've never had a problem with pasta bought in plastic bags and transferred to mylar.



This is our method as well.

Wait...is this true?  The oxygen absorber actually ruins long-term storage sugar?  Can anyone else verify this?  I'm about to put 50 lbs of sugar away, so this is important info for me.

At the LDS cannery, they can the sugar WITHOUT any O2 absorbers as they say it will turn the sugar into a solid brick.  

That's good enough for me.  Thanks, xmikex.

Sugar and salt will basically last forever if you keep them dry and critter free.
If they do absorb moisture, they will turn into a solid, but still easy to break up and use.

We store both in watertight totes from The Container Store :

We store the sizes that we currently use and rotate through them.

My wife does canning, so we also have a 6gal bucket with a gamma lid that we keep full of sugar.
We also store salt for canning/pickling in a similar way.

Our pantry is also climate controlled, so, YMMV.

What else to store in 5-gal buckets with mylar and absorbers....



Your last set of undies/socks/t-shirts that you just replaced.  If times got hard and you couldn't afford new ones, the old ones may have to be new again.

Matches.

Bulk ammo.

Powdered laundry detergent.

A new pair of whatever shoes you like.

Seeds from your garden.

If you're just talking food, go to emergency essentials website and see what they offer in their super pails....

rice, beans, cereals, oats, pop corn, lentils, pasta, orzo, etc...not much limit to what you can do.

I think that's my first DT!

Off topic question here but...



How do you get the pickle smell out of 5 gallon buckets?  I get a really good deal on these but after two years, they still have a pickle smell.

02 absorbers get hot to use up the oxygen and that heat will cause sugar to melt together.  You won't be easily breaking that up.  Salt may also do this but I have never added salt to a recipe where I wanted it to melt so I don't know what it does when it heats up.



Either way, sugar and salt are super easy to store.  I have a popcorn tin of sugar and it is not sealed up or anything, just a regular cheap tin cleaned out and sugar poured into it.  I keep it on my pantry shelf and fill the little sugar jar up from it.  While I sometimes have to lightly hit it with a spoon to break it up by no means am I doing anything like what it takes to break up a huge cube of ice into smaller pieces with an ice pick.  The sugar easily breaks up with minimal force.



I do not store stuff in cardboard or paper bags.  The materials does not always do well over time, depends on moisture and sometimes the shiny part does odd things as well.



If I want mac and cheese long term I will store elbow maccroni and powdered cheese along with whatever I want to add into that to get the flavor I want.  Elbow maccaroni seems like a lot of air space to me so I prefer to store spaghetti, I am one of those folks who considers past to be pasta and it is only when you get pasta filled with stuff, like ravioli, that I actually consider it to not be interchangable pasta.



I like vacumn sealing smaller portions in canning jars.  No 02 absorbers to worry about heating up my sugar or salt and it is resealable with ease.



But at some point you look at larger portions and I am finally there this winter.  With the holidays here I will be stocking up on a lot of the stuff on sale for the cooking of holiday favorites and putting it up.



Right now I have a lot of rice, sugar, salt, kidney beans, and some other beans.  After messing with lentils I will be putting more of them up soon.



If I decide to mess with a grinder then wheat and some other stuff becomes worth putting up, if I don't have a grinder then it is not really worth putting up.  The grinder is coming just because I want to get around to making some flat bread and I want a longer term storage time than what store bought flour offers.  Though store bought flour is not bad and I have some of it around.



As mentioned you can look at what other places are selling in sealed cans and see what you want to mess around with.



On the most recent campout a fella out of louisiana had some local rice stuff he brought along and I had never even heard of it but it was good.  Down there they tend to use rice about like east tn. uses corn.  



Run searches on putting food away.  Using 02 absorbers takes the oxygen away from any bugs or other stuff so the eggs can't hatch and eat your food.  With stuff that can't take the heat of an 02 absorber you may choose to not worry about it or you may choose to pick some container that will handle having a vacumn pulled on it without collapsing.  I don't consider vacumn sealer bags to be long term but I just have issues with plastic so if you want to consider that then do research on it.  I like canning jars but they are not cheap for big bulk amounts.



Diatomaceous earth, get the edible one since there are 2 kinds, mixed in with stuff is also used by many folks.  The diatomaceous earth will kill weevils and other bugs in the food.  I have not done this but consider it an option.



Since alaska has bugs aplenty I don't go with using a deep freeze to kill stuff, I figure it will kill the bug but probably not the eggs.  Once again this comes down to doing your own research and what temp you choose will determine your choice on this method.

In addition to the standard items....

Elbow Macaroni
Sugar

I think both of those ^^^ have been covered in the above posts.

I don't remember seeing this though:

Potato Flakes (Instant Potatoes)

Vinegar and Bleach.

Start with a small amount of vinegar diluted in water.  Then use bleach diluted in water.  The bleach will also be a disinfectant.

Wow thanks for the replies everyone.  Got 2 more items to my list
Potato flakes and Grapenuts, 1 bucket each

Do you really need to worry about bugs in your flour/pasta etc if you're using O2 absorbers?  Won't the lack of oxygen kill them?

Yes and no.
The O2 absorbers will kill live bugs and lack of oxygen will prevent new ones from hatching,
however, there could still be eggs in there that will hatch after opening (given enough time)

OK, so will freezing kill eggs?  I just started storing some things this fall, maybe I'll put my buckets out in the garage for a few days this winter.

Freezing will not kill the eggs and most studies I have seen suggest you need to freeze for a couple of weeks.
And I think it has to be a deep freeze.

The eggs are not the problem, you just don't want them to hatch.
Although, even if they hatch, the flour is still safe to eat.

Thanks.  I might stick them out in the garage anyway for a month or so this winter since nature provides a pretty serious deep freeze for free.

My only concern with that might be the buckets cracking from being moved or overfilled.

No, your sugar is fine.

I think sugar or salt is going to turn into a brick no matter what you do. What I do is a have a few 1'' flat wood drills that I use to drill into that brick of sugar or salt and then scoop out the ground up product. Then you can break the brick once you have it all drilled out and put the chunks in a coffee bean grinder to finish the job.

If you go to some of those large restaurant supply houses, you will be surprised at what you can find there in bulk and it's packaged up very well from the start. I buy bulk potatoes in both sliced, and powdered. I have bought huge bags of jello, puddings, and onions. It's pretty amazing what you can find in those places and the prices aren't half bad either.

As far as yeast goes, put it in a small sealed mylar bag and throw it in the freezer and it will keep forever. I've use yeast that was 15 years old and still fine. Nothing but yeast in the bag but try to squeese out as much air as possible before you seal it up.

A friend of mine found a place to buy Wabasha Heritage powdered milk in 4 pound bags. It was dirt cheap to. That stuff is the BEST milk we've ever had. Now for the embarrassing part, I bought 150 bags, about 600 pounds of powdered milk and I just threw them into a dozen or so totes. I was going to pack them up properly later on, but some how I forgot about them.

Well, I found them last year, and the use by date on the bags is Dec. 15 2004 and that's EXACTLY how it reads on the bag. I expected them to be worthless, but when I opened up a bag, it looked fine. I made a glass of it and it tasted GREAT. We've used about 20 bags of it for both drinking and cooking and every bag is perfect.

I'm sure some nutritional value is gone, but then again who drinks an 8 oz glass of milk? We drink 12 oz at time or more so any value lost, we make up for in volume we drink.

I've packed candy in A LOT of those mylar bags too. I LOVE Tootsie rolls, those little ones, and I buy them in 5 lbs bags. I fill the bag with nitrogen, and candy and that's it. I do not vacuum seal them or do anything that would compress the candy because I didn't want it to pack tight together. I cracked open a 5 gallon pail a year or two ago that was sealed in 1994. The Tootsie rolls were as good as the day I sealed them up and not rock hard at all. After Halloween, I would always buy up a bunch of cheap candy and pack it away.

If you do popcorn, do not put in any type of moisture absorbor. What I found was it drys out the corn so much that there's not enough moisture left in the corn to heat up, expand and pop. It just kinda looks like all the seeds that are half popped at the bottom of your bag. Fill your mylar bag with nitrogen, and an O2 absorbor and call it good.

Another thing you can do after you open the stored popcorn, and find it isn't popping well, is to soak it in water for a day or more, kinda like beans, and it will really help with making them pop when heated up.