As somewhat regular readers know, one of my culinary staples around here is ‘the meat tray‘. Succinctly, the local Albertsons takes four meat products that are either slow movers or closing in on their ‘must use by’ dates and bundles ’em up in a tray and sells it for $20. It’s almost always a 3# tube of ground beef, some cut of chicken, sausage of some kind, and some pork. One tray, and a modest amount of cooking talent, can cover a weeks’ worth of dining.
Also, I patrol the meat aisle once (or twice) a day looking for stuff marked down 50% that can go in my freezer. Yesterday was a case of the stars lining up just so:
Meat Tray at 50% off. No matter how you cut it, ten bucks for a meat tray is a good deal. So, time to cook. Needed some canned tomatoes so I trotted to the basement and pulled these off the shelf:
Canned tomatoes that have been sitting in the classic ‘cool, dry place’ since 2015. Two years past the ‘best buy’ date. Status? Just fine. Tomato products, because of their acidity, are notorious for having can failure in medium- to long-term storage. This also happens with any other food product with high acidity…pineapple, for example. (By the way, to my way of thinking, five-to-ten years is pretty much where I catalog things as ‘medium-term storage’. More than ten is what I consider long-term storage.) So, as a precaution, I check the cans for any bulging or that sort of thing and give the contents a careful eyeing. But…thats a good practice for any canned food.
This is what that whole store-what-you-eat-and-eat-what-you-store thing looks like.
It’s the beginning of the year so this is probably a good time for me to go inventory the stored food and replace whats been consumed over the year. Just refilled one of the rice buckets the other day, so i need to pick up at least anouther couple 25# bags of rice. The deep freeze, especially, got a workout this previous year and I need to top it off. Too bad those 50% deals on the meat trays are so scarce.
I cooked and ate some meat I’d vac sealed and put in the deep freeze in 2013 just last week. Indistinguishable from meat frozen yesterday.
WRT cans, I’ve had a bunch of failures with pineapple this year. I store in my garage, which is neither cool nor dry for much of the year.
We don’t eat many things made with tomato products, so I store only a few cans, not enough to have an opinion on.
BATTERIES, on the other hand- now I’ve been using the costco Kirkland brand long enough to have failures just like with duracel. The Kirkland don’t seem to swell as much, and the discharge is cleaner and easier to remove. I found a multi pack that had corroded and leaked, but still had “good until” 2023 clearly printed on the unopened packaging. I took them back and got replacements from costco. They were reluctant as I had bought them years ago, but I pointed to the “good until” and they were clearly no longer good….
My storage conditions are poor, so I expect and accept that I’ll have spoilage. Rat urine is particularly corrosive, btw (ask me how I know…) I’m now putting cans under cover, just to keep that possibility at a minimum. Boxed pasta/meals/etc do not survive rats or moisture. Gamma seal lids won’t keep them out either, and you lose the lid.
nick
Re: rat proof cans
What about the metal cans that have re-sealable metal lids like the sort roofing tar and driveway tar come in?
That might do it, if they were lazy. Once they know there is food there, they won’t stop until they get it.
I opted for poison and traps. Eventually I think I got them all. I’m getting ready to move everything back onto the shelves in the garage, but it’ll all be in big tubs with lids this time.
I’ve had everything in tubs in the driveway under tarps. Somewhat less than convenient for “buy what you use, use what you buy.”
Stock up on rat traps, and rat poison. If you get infested after SHTF, it’ll be damn near impossible to get rid of them. BTW, none of the traps on youtube worked for me. Only poison finally made inroads. Rats are smart. Really smart, and they communicate with each other. If your trap doesn’t kill them right away, the others learn to avoid it. I can leave peanut butter uncovered in a dish and it won’t get eaten now that they’ve learned that PB = trap. I’m trying to make that work for me…
nick
BTW, the gamma seal lid? Ate right thru it and then they emptied a 5 gallon bucket of sugar in 2 days.
holy shit, are those rats on steroids?
It would be prudent to wash the bucket assembly after sealing, to remove any trace of food taste/smell. However, I’ve seen rodents chew through clear water bottles to get to the water.
They will also chew heavier hard plastic, if desperate enough. That was the lid to a small aquarium I was keeping some mice in. That was their version of The Great Escape. They started jumping up the glass wall, and could make it about half way, maybe 6-8 inches, when they started. Couple weeks of leg exercise, and they reached the lid, and then hung upside down while chewing at the edge of the flip lid. They got out, and fled the house.
To prevent external corrosion; remove label,mark contents with sharpie,coat in varnish(cheap stuff works good). Old sailing trick-cans will last over a year exposed to saltwater environment,no mystery cans when labels degrade and can clog bilge pumps. Before buying in quantity open a can to check internal lining,no lining short to medium term at best.
Shops get grease in 30 gallon(approx) steel drums with a plastic liner(no cleaning),buy cheap,fill with properly packaged food(vacuum packed/mylar) put lid back on. The rat that can chew through that,you’d better leave. 55 gal drums are also available but not really moveable without special equipment(drum hand trucks)
The stern wheeler Arabia sunk in the Mississippi back in 1856. In 1987 it was excavated from a farmers field (river had moved). The canned food on board was still edible and some of that was just sealed with cork and wax.
I do the store what I eat, eat what I store method as well. As did my parents, their farmer parents, and so on back through the ages.
Several years ago I replaced canned tomato sauce, paste and purée with tomato powder. You may also be able to make decent tomato juice with it, I’ve just never tried. I get #10 cans from Emergeny Essentials. The flavor is very good and I no longer need to replace or clean up those tomato products from my wet canned foods. A quarter cup of powder will make half a cup of paste or a cup of sauce. I store it in a Fido Italian glass jar, and usually alternate opening a can with a friend, as one can is a lot of tomato.