The Home Pantry: What To Store
by Chef Keith Snow
Why build up your pantry, and what to fill it with?
So why all this emphasis on the home pantry? As you will see and read, the well-stocked home pantry is one of the easiest and least painful of all investments. It does not require brokers, investment accounts, bank transfers, downside risk, tax consequences or the loss of use of your capital.
If you look at the average American home pantry you will see a small closet in the kitchen with some white wire shelves with roughly 10 sq feet of shelf space. Hardly enough to store a week of food. This set-up is found in the majority of homes. how did this happen? What happened to the large walk-in pantries that our grandparents had? How did we slowly give away our ability to cook and eat for long periods from our home pantry to corporate take out, dine in and fast food?
As outlined earlier in this course the rise of "just in time delivery" and modern high-tech logistics with barcodes, predictive stock levels, and sales tracking etc. has transformed our homes over time to become very un-prepared, dependent boxes.
In most supermarkets, the computer knows how many SKU's are in the store at any time and even orders more items automatically when a certain “par level” is reached. Behind the scenes, there are forklifts, conveyor belts, pallets, trucks, trains, DSD (direct store delivery) drivers all working 24/7/365 to keep the stores stocked using “just in time” delivery. Gone are the days when the store had a large “stock room” where it pulled inventory to keep the store stocked and received weekly shipments.
As trucks come in, usually at night, contractors, pull, unpack and stock shelves as inventory arrives. These people do not work for the store itself, rather separate companies that only stock shelves for supermarket companies who participate in “just in time” delivery and inventory methods.
The stores even dictate to manufacturers how large cases of products can be in order to reduce store inventory to what can fit on the shelves. I have been manufacturing shelf-stable food products since 1992, and usually had my products packed 12 per case. In the last few years, stores have now demanded 6 pack cases so no stock would be left over in the back of the store. The store shelves usually can hold only 6 items deep, so they don’t want any leftovers in back.
When all this information is taking into account, you see that the home pantry is going the way of the dodo bird or dinosaur, that is to say extinct. Of course, we homesteaders, peppers and people that can look further than a few days into the future are pushing back on this pantry extinction by storing more food and building larger pantries, root cellars, and secondary refrigeration.
Speaking of secondary refrigeration, this is a good time to mention a product called the Cool Bot, a small device that allows anyone to build a walk-in cooler without paying thousands of dollars. I highly suggest checking out the product by visiting their website at Store It Cold.com. Having a large secondary refrigerator that can be powered by solar, is a great prep to look into.
As we wake up to the fragility of just in time delivery and even more importantly, the fact that its existence has programmed people to no longer store food, we see a fault line that can price a large crack in our home security.
In Food Storage Feast we discuss all the recent natural disasters that have caused food shortages so let’s all agree that just in time delivery while shiny, modern and automatic, can be a disaster at some point. We don’t want to be victimized by it, we want to exploit it.
Getting Ready To Stock Up
One of the challenged people encounter when they decide to start storing food is the fact that it can be daunting and expensive. Just take a quick search on the internet for storable food and you will be clubbed over the head with scare tactics and offers to purchase large “stockpiles’ of food. I know too many folks who have pallets of “emergency food” in either garage or basement with no idea what it tastes like, how to cook with it or even if they would eat it.
Some people have successfully avoided purchasing pallets of dehydrated foods and have stocked up on grains such a rice, wheat, and oats coupled with beans, sugar, salt etc. This scenario still poses problems but I like the sound of this better.
Before you think I'm against prepackaged, boil and eat foods, let me first say that I think every family should have at least a 30 day supply of meals that need only hot water to make. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner for 30 days for each person. For those of you who have heard of Dave Ramsey, this is your emergency fund. Get this accomplished before starting to build the larger pantry.
You can get these meals from a reputable supplier like Emergency Essentials. who by the way is my preferred supplier of ready to eat foods and supplies of all kinds. These ready to eat foods can be individually packed or in tins. The next thing to do is to figure out how much water each meal requires to cook and multiply that out; 3 meals per day, 30 days, each member of the family. Then, add to that figure 1/2 gallon of drinking water, for each person for 30 days. That is a minimum amount.
Accumulate and store this water immediately after you purchase the food. You can use large food-safe water barrels or bottled water. And make sure you have a reliable, portable water filter, that can fill bottles and that can treat collected water, such as a Berkey.
Once you have purchased these ready to eat meals the next step is to build your pantry, from the ground up, over time. Most of the recipes/videos in this course require one or more commodity items like rice, beans, wheat, corn, oats, canned foods, spices sauces etc. These items can be accumulated day by day, week by week, month by month, not all at once. I used the verb accumulate to paint the picture that this takes some time. I don’t expect that students of this course go into debt or go purchase everything at once. A home pantry is a complex system. Slow is best here.
What do I buy first?
This is not Weight Watchers where I tell you what to eat each day then sell you the foods…..this is your decision.
This is hard to answer because everybody is different but I suggest the following approach; find recipes in this course that you want to try, prepare these, eat these become comfortable with the flavors, tastes etc. Then start accumulating the items needed to cook them. So for example, if you like the potato flakes recipes start with potato flakes, I suggest accumulating a 3 month supply of these. I can’t tell you how much this is because I don’t know how often in 3 months you would eat these.
Let’s assume 4-5 boxes is a good place to start. I always try to purchase items in bulk or on sale, whenever possible. For example, Hungry Man potato flakes in large boxes were on sale in my local store at 2 boxes for $3 so I bought 6. Now remember I have a large stock of these already, so I did not need to buy 20 of them. But we eat them, we like them and we store them, so when they are on sale we buy more. Keep in mind, anything over a 3 month supply will need repackaging, especially east of the Mississippi river where relative humidity levels are high. I like to use vacuum bags as potato flakes only have a shelf life of 6-12 months. If stored properly you can expect 5-10 years.
If you make a project out of getting these items or others packed for long-term storage it’s a good idea to use an oxygen absorber in the vacuum bags, it’s cheap insurance against moisture. When packing potato flakes or other items like rice, beans wheat etc. it makes sense to pack amounts that can be used in less than a few months. don’t pack 20 lbs. of potato flakes into one bag because once you crack them open they need to be eaten or resealed. Instead, pack them into smaller portions to ensure freshness.
This example can be done with the other major food groups we discuss like rice, beans, wheat berries oat groats, rolled oats etc. at the same time. This is ongoing work, each week something should be purchased and added to your pantry. In a short period of time, you will have a large pantry, that you are regularly pulling from to create daily meals and the beginnings of a long-term storage pantry as well.
These are the major items in my pantry storage plan.
* Coffee - LOTS of it...
* rice (parboiled, Jasmine, Basmati, Short grain)
* legumes- beans: black, pinto, kidney, garbanzo, cannellini
* split peas, lentils (green, black, red), pigeon peas
* Cornmeal
* Dried kernel corn
* wheat berries ( assorted) White, Winter, spelt, rye
* oat groats
* rolled oats
* canned foods big focus of mine
* Spices (extensive) whole and ground including salt and peppercorns
* tuna fish
* canned meat, chicken, fish
* Condiments -mayo, mustard, ketchup, chili sauce, bottled dressings
* olive oil, coconut oil, peanut oil
* Ethnic-soy sauce, coconut milk, sesame oil, chili paste, fish sauce
* Pasta, stored in buckets, extensive, many shapes
* peanut butter, creamy and chunky
* freeze dried-meats, vegetables, grains, fruit, sauces, dairy
[This list is still under construction… watch this space.]