Propper food storage allows you to buy in bulk at a cost savings, or simply keep your own-produced food for a longer period of time. You don’t need to spend much on food storage systems. Here are my best tips.
Store dry food in square, 4-gallon buckets
Normal 5-gallon buckets make poor use of pantry space. Their round shape only allows you to use half the space in your storage area. By using square buckets, they stack closer together without wasting space in between. They also are way easier to open and the lids last longer. I purchase our 4-gallon, square, food-grade buckets from US Plastics online. They have good pricing and very fast shipping. They don’t have a rubber seal but seem to seal tight enough to keep all the bugs out. We were able to put twice as much food on our shelves by using these square 4-gallon buckets instead of 5-gallon round buckets.
Reuse store-bought sauce jars
Commercial food jars use a one-piece lug-style lid. Some of our local Amish taught me that those jars and lids are re-useable several times. They work in either pressure-canning or water-bath canning and usually are good for three or four re-uses before they won’t seal. As long as you follow regular canning timetables, if they don’t seal or the seal breaks within 24 hours just refrigerate and eat the contents within a day or two. Consider it the same as an opened jar of store-bought food. I will say that this is not a USDA-endorsed practice, but the science and data are with me on it. Here’s a video I made where I reuse old sauce jars.
Learn Water-bath Canning
Water-bath canning, as well as steam canning, requires no special equipment other than jars and a lid. It just needs a pot of boiling water. A steam canner is essentially a pot of boiling water with a lid. And the USDA recently determined it to be the exact equivalent of water-bath canning. With a Granite Ware 7.5 Quart Blanching Pot ($20 at Menards) you can water-bath or steam can all acidic foods per USDA recommendations. Steam canning is essentially water-bath canning but with less water so it heats up much faster. However, for longer processing times, you might end up running out of steam. Just keep an eye on it.
If you use a regular pot, you’ll need either a canning rack or steamer rack. A small towel on the bottom works for water-bath canning. Otherwise, jars will crack. To learn more about home-canning, check out this article: The 3 Things You Need to Start Canning
Learn simple, basic recipes
Biscuits, pancakes, and waffles all use the same four ingredients, it’s mainly just different ratios of flour, fat/oil, baking powder, and maybe an egg. Boil biscuit dough and you get dumplings. Add cornmeal, hot water, and fry it and you have hushpuppies. Check out the September issue for several very basic, tasty recipes like that. By knowing just a few simple, cheap options, you can do quite a lot with very cheap, basic ingredients.
Here’s our recipe for 4-Ingredient Biscuits that are quick and tasty.
Purchase bulk grain from a farmer
Cornmeal is a staple in our kitchen. If I don’t grow enough corn, I can buy a 40-pound bag of corn from a local farmer for $7. That’s 17.5 cents a pound. Walmart charges $2/pound for cornmeal. As long as it’s clean and smells like fresh corn, it’s good to eat. It will most likely have all the same pesticides and herbicides as what you can buy in the grocery store. I can grind it into a cornmeal with a coffee grinder or a decent blender. They also sell groats for 19 cents a pound. Groats are traditional, unhulled, whole-grain oats.
I recently bought 1800 pounds of corn for a farmer for $4.50 a bushel. The farmer told me he doesn’t use herbicides or pesticides on his small, 40-acre field. That’s basically organic whole grain for a little over 8 cents a pound. And it’s darn good corn. It may sound silly to some, but we’re feeding both our pigs and ourselves on that corn.
On that same note, there are a few potato farmers in my area. The potato harvest was abundant and there was a surplus. Farmers and some of the farm stores are selling 50-pound sacks of fresh, unwashed potatoes for $15 each. That’s 1/5 of the grocery store price. Go check Facebook marketplace, and ask around, to see what local, bulk foods are available from your local producers.