I'm not a fan of many dehydrated vegetables,... if I ever could splurge on a freeze dryer (not in this lifetime), it would be at least partly to be able to store veggies (and fruit, though to a lesser extent) long term.
I've found the dehydrator to be most useful for "soup and stew" vegetables...onions, peppers and tomatoes come out exceptionally well, and store well for years if vacuum sealed and kept in the dark. Commercially dehydrated potatoes are excellent, and I need to learn how to do them at home (I suspect they treat them with sulfur... I've tried ascorbic acid to keep them from turning gray, but I'm not impressed)
Brown sugar?! What happened to yours? We just did a major reorganize, assess, and inventory of the preps, and found some brown sugar that somehow got taken downstairs before I had a chance to properly pack it. 7, 2# bags just packed in a 5 gallon pail with a lid, and it all was soft and just fine! Most of my supply is packed in Mylar bags, but I don't use oxygen absorbers in sugar or salt.
If you're got hard or dry, that's simple to fix... just put it in a closed container with either a couple of pieces of Apple (fresh apple, cut into quarters) off a couple slices if fresh bread. Wait 48 hours... the sugar will be soft again.
White sugar that got hard isn't quite as simple. You have to break it into reasonable sized pieces (softball size works for me) and then "regranulate" it by rubbing it through a mesh sieve. It takes a bit if time and muscle, and is best done outside because it gets everywhere , but it doesn't make nearly the mess that breaking down 80# of crystallized honey in the comb and separating it does... that was my fun project for the last two days. I might get the kitchen un-stickyed by Labor Day.. if I'm lucky!
I think my biggest disappointment is how unreliable the vacuum sealed stuff is. I used a good name brand sealer and top of the line bags, but in one pail, I could have 5, 5# bags of flour... 2 of them would be solid "bricks" which smelled and tasted fresh, and 3 would appear sealed (no flour leaking anywhere, even if you put pressure on the bag) but had no vacuum, and the flour was rancid and spoiled.
Same problem with white rice. We don't eat much rice now, but I figure it's a valuable prep if gardening was impossible or we had a potato crop failure. However, contrary to what some people seem to manage, I've found that even white rice will get NASTY rancid in even a couple of years if not WELL sealed, either as a "brick" with a good vacuum sealed or (my preference because food is expensive) in heavy Mylar with oxygen absorbers.
Overall, though, I've got to say I was pretty happy and even impressed with how well the LTS food in buckets has held up. We do use it in everyday eating (using those screw on Gamma Seal lids for the "working pail" of wheat or whatever, but my storage is figured on feeding all the grown kids and grandkids if needed, so by necessity the amounts are larger than we can rotate in a year.
Pasta seems to store forever, though even if not optimally packaged. Again, I had done that ended up just tossed in a 5 gallon bucket and put down cellar (this usually happens around the holidays when hubby us helping clean house, and gets in a bit too much of a hurry). And yet, it was perfectly fine,
I don't store stuff like cake mixes or Bisquick... I use mtpy own "master mix" recipe that I've used for over 40 years. These days, I make it with butter or lard and kerp it in a gallon jar in the fridge or root cellar. But if I wanted to make it for long term storage (a year or two,.. the baking powder wouldn't work after that) I'd make it with coconut oil and seal it in Mylar with O2 absorbers.
Oh! I've found baking powder, well sealed, keeps and works for YEARS beyond its expiration date! Believe it or not, I found a metal tin of baking powder that had gotten pushed to the back of my herb and spice cupboard from 2003! And it worked fine!
However, these days the morons are packaging the smaller "consumer" stuff in foil lined cardboard "cans" and the expiration date had better be watched! It goes stale, fast.
So, what I do is buy the large, metal food service cans. Then when I open one, I transfer sone to my "working can" (one if the now-obsolete and nearly an antique metal cans) in the kitchen cupboard, and vacuum seal the rest in glass canning jars, which will kerp it fresh and potent for years, if not decades. And, sadly, I've noticed they are now moving to plastic containers for the food service stuff, so when I needed to restock (I do a lot if baking, although far less than I used to) I immediately opened the new container and transferred the contents to glass jars.
One packaged treat I have stored is pudding mixes, since we have a nearly-endless supply of fresh milk. And there store pretty much forever, without any flavor changes, as soon as you keep the packages dry. I usually stuff them in gallon zip lock bags.
Speaking of those Gamma Seal lids... they pretty much suck! They are NOT waterproof, and they break out and collapse if you stack another pail on top of them. Not worth the money, IMHO, with the possible exception of what I use them for.. on pails which I need to open and close frequently.
Oh... lids, in general! The Wal-Mart lids from 10-15 years ago are sturdy, still flexible and still useful. The ones from about 5 years and newer are crap! Thin, brittle,... they're almost impossible to remove from a pail, and using a lid wrench usually breaks pieces off. Man, stuff these days is JUNK!
For that matter, my son was buying food grade 5 gallon pails for fermenting his pig grain... they consistently break down and become useless trash in a year or so, even though they're stored out if the sun most of the time. By contrast, were using buckets that hydraulic fluid or motor oil came in (well scrubbed originally, of course!) that are pushing 20 years old! What are they doing... making all the new plastics biodegrade within 5 years, or something?
Summerthyme
