Canned Goods Shelf-life

I found this information on canned good shelf-life and thought it was important to share:

Taken from Wendi Dewitt's blog- http://everythingunderthesunblog.blogspot.com/ 

Thursday, May 6, 2010

http://extension.usu.edu/foodstorage/htm/canned-goods/

This quote is from the University of Utah Extension Center.

"Commercially canned foods should retain their best quality until the expiration code date on the can. This date is usually 2-5 years from the manufacture date. High acid foods usually have a shorter shelf life than low acid foods. For emergency storage, commercially canned foods in metal or jars will remain safe to consume as long as the seal has not been broken."

The Canned Food Alliance also shares this view that canned foods are safe to eat as long as the can is not damaged in any way. They will lose nutritional value but are safe to eat. With this information, and the knowledge that most of the foods from the cannery will last 20 and 30 years, food storage and it's rotation have become much easier for everyone.

Oils and Storing Oils

Need to know more about which oils to buy and how to store them?  The following links should help...

CHECK IT OUT!

An overview of oils
http://www.survival-center.com/foodfaq/ff10-fat.htm

Tips on which oils are the healthiest and info about different kinds of oils
http://www.askdrsears.com/html/4/t043800.asp

Storage and shelf-life advice (make sure you look at all of the related topics in the right sidebar)
http://shelflifeadvice.com/cooking-ingredients/liquid/cooking-oils

Weevils

  Here are a few tips from the "myfoodstoragedeals" blog:
http://myfoodstoragedeals.blogspot.com/search/label/Getting%20rid%20of%20weevils


*To kill weevil, freeze your flour, sugar, wheat, cornmeal, etc. for 72 hours or longer. You can then sift the weevil out or just pick out the few dead weevils you see remaining. They are perfectly fine to eat (sounds gross, but you really wouldn’t taste them), and once you kill them through freezing, they should be pretty much dissolved or gone. If you do not have freezer space you can just try to sift them out with a fine cloth or colander. They are so small, this can be tricky, but may be worth a try.

*To prevent weevil from appearing in your food later as you store it, you can freeze all of your items BEFORE you put it in your long term storage for the same 72 hours. This should prevent weevil from hatching or spreading as you store the items long term.

*Put dried bay leaves (a few leaves) in the bottom and top of the container you are storing your grains in. This seems to be the most popular method. Many people put bay leaves in their pantry, food storage room, and closets. Costco sells Bay Leaves in a large container for fairly inexpensive.

*Dry Ice Method: Put a pound of dry ice (per 50lbs. of wheat) in the bottom of a plastic bucket. Leave the lid on loosly until the dry ice vaperizes. Then seal the bucket. Be careful not to seal the bucket lid too soon or it could crack or explode :)

*Microwave your wheat (dried) for 5 minutes to kill the weevil and their eggs.

*Place your wheat in a glass of water. Those wheat berries that float to the top are most likely infested with weevil eggs or bugs. You can remove them and use the other berries as normal.

*What do you do if you have seen weevil in your storage room? Take all foodstuffs out of your cabinets or off of your shelves. Wash the cabinets down thoroughly in case there are eggs remaining on the surface. Then wash/wipe down all items you are putting back into the cabinet with a warm/hot rag. You will be after any visible living organism; but, you are really after eggs which may be on the outside of these food bags as a result of infestations in stores and warehouses. Once you have sufficiently cleaned the surface and the food bags (if necessary) you can return the food to your shelves.

*Find the infected food source to try and locate the problem. Many times weevil or insects are coming from one main food source and spreading. This is common in a long term food storage room. If one item is infected, most likely others will be as well. When you find and get rid of the main problem/source, it should help your weevil troubles subside.

*Empty out your food items into clean buckets or keep them in plastic containers to help keep bugs out of your food. Sealed buckets are best, but any container will help protect agains these critters.

*TIP: Buy your wheat, rice, and sugar from Costco because if you ever find weevil in their food, they will return the product for a refund or exchange. It is like a food insurance policy :)

Storing Apples

Here are some simple tips on how to store apples for a long, long time By Don Fallick  http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles/fallick41.html

Almost any kind of apple will keep for three or four months, or even longer, if stored properly. It’s cheap and easy to do. All you need is newspaper, a box or basket, and apples. A root cellar is optional, but not necessary.
The main causes of apple spoilage are time, bruises, and contact with a rotten spot on another apple.

Time

Time can be stretched by selecting long-keeping varieties of apples for storage. Tart and thick-skinned apples like Jonathans generally keep longer than sweet or thin-skinned ones like Delicious. Good keepers also have very firm flesh. The best keepers I have found are Spur Winter Bananas—from C&O Nursery, P.O. Box 116, Wenatchee, WA 98807.
They are yellow and tart at harvest, but get redder and sweeter, and actually taste better after a couple of months in storage.

Contact

Prevent contact between apples stored for the winter by wrapping them individually in sheets of newspaper. The easiest way to do this is to unfold a section of newspaper all the way and tear it into quarters. Then stack the quarters. Avoid sections printed with colored ink, which contains poisonous heavy metals.
Place an apple on top of the stack and fold the top sheet of paper up around the apple, wrapping it in paper. Give the corners a slight twist—just enough to make them stay wrapped. If you twist them too hard, the paper will tear. It’s not necessary to exclude air. Just twist hard enough so the paper doesn’t come unwrapped before the apples are boxed. The paper prevents contact between apples, so just one rotten apple won’t spoil the whole bunch. With practice, you’ll be able to wrap and store apples as fast as you can scan them for bruises and sort them.

Sorting

Always handle apples carefully, to avoid bruising them. Apples with even small bruises must never be stored with “keepers.” Only perfect apples should be used for long-term storage. Even minor imperfections speed spoilage. While you’re wrapping, check each apple for cut skin, soft spots, or bruises. Even bruised apples taste fine when they’re fresh, so sort the best culls into a box to be eaten right away. If there are too many, make apple pie filling out of the excess. Use culls with extensive blemishes for cider. Or cut out any really gross parts and make applesauce.
My family owns two Victorio strainers. We blanch the apples to soften them, cut them in half, throw them in the hopper, and turn the crank. The Victorio separates the pulp from the skins, seeds, and stems, and produces fresh applesauce, ready for canning. With both strainers going, we can put up more than two bushels of apples an hour.
Canned pie filling, applesauce, and cider will keep for a year or more. Fresh cider that has started to turn sour can be made into hard cider, vinegar, or applejack (see Issue #35, Sept/Oct 1995). All three will keep indefinitely.

Storage

Boxed apples need to be kept in a cool, dark spot where they won’t freeze. Freezing ruptures all of an apple’s cells, turning it into one large bruise overnight. The usual solution is to store apples in a root cellar. But root cellars often have potatoes in them, and experts say that apples and potatoes should never be stored in the same room. This may seem incongruous, but there is a reason. As they age, potatoes release an otherwise harmless gas that makes apples spoil faster. If you can keep the gas away from your apples, they will keep just fine. Just don’t store them right next to potatoes.
I keep wrapped apples in a cardboard box. It need not be airtight, just tight enough to impede air circulation. I’ve kept apples in an unheated basement, a pantry, an enclosed porch, an unheated attic, even in a root cellar, potatoes and all. Using these simple methods, I have kept ordinary apples until late February, and Winter Banana apples into March.

Utah Cooperative Extension

I was searching for info on how to store various items and came across the Utah Cooperative Extension site. I liked how the info on food storage was well organized, easy to navigate and easy to understand.

Take a look....

http://extension.usu.edu/foodstorage/

Also, there is info about food preservation on the site at this link....

http://extension.usu.edu/foodpreservation/


DON'T forget this site--it also has a lot of information on storage

http://www.survival-center.com/foodfaq/ff1-toc.htm