We’re big bread eaters in my family. A few years back, I freeze dried some tortilla’s (March 2019) to try to put something vaguely bread-like into our storage. They were normal, from Kroger, nothing weird about them. My primary question was whether something with so little water content to begin with would come out well in the freeze dryer. They are a difficult food to store because you need a big bag to store them in (I ended up using a 12″x17″x6″ bag, which held maybe 8 tortilla’s due to the way they bend, and most ended up broken.)
So I did maybe 2 trays and ended up with 2 Mylar bags of tortillas. I found them early last year, sometime at the end of Winter or start of spring, and I opened up a bag. They were 5 years old or so at the time. They were crispy, tasty, and certainly did well in the freeze dryer. So, when all is said and done, this was a successful experiment.
Now this is where it gets interesting. Those open (still in ziplock) tortillas have been sitting in a warehouse since last year when I opened them. I’ve been cleaning out the warehouse as we prepare to move, and I found them. My assumption was to throw them out, because certainly they must be bad after spending all summer, fall and winter just on a table.
However, after all this time, they were still perfect.
Ok, not a that great of a story, but it goes against what my gut thought. In general, tortilla’s go bad in weeks, so to have them last 6 years, 1 of those years with no oxygen absorption or moisture control, makes me consider looking at adding them to my storage, no matter how bulky they are. While they would break trying to use them for actual cooking, they taste good right out of the bag, and would be good with soup or stew.
A second thought I had about them was I wonder if I could just dehydrate them instead of freeze drying them. It might only take a few hours to do a load. I just moved my dehydrator into my food storage area, so I am going to give that a try also!
(Sorry about the lack of photos, I didn’t think about writing it up until I was putting it in the freeze dryer)
This weekend, I decided to dig into a food storage project and test out a recipe I’ve been working on for my updated one-year supply plan: a Spicy Turkey Sausage Chili with Rice. I’m trying to modernize the traditional LDS food storage recommendations, focusing on shelf-stable ingredients that the average American family would enjoy, with less reliance on a more particularly LDS bent (Their recommendations are good if you’re a homesteader, but out of place in the average American neighborhood). This chili seemed like a perfect candidate—packed with stuff from my food storage: canned chili beans, dried onions, rice, plus a hefty dose of spices that would keep things interesting during a long-term emergency. But man, while this dish was a winner in terms of flavor, it was HOT! Turns out when I wrote the recipe out I had used ‘tsp’ correctly, when I actually started adding the spices, I added 2 Tablespoons of cayenne instead of 2 Teaspoons. I did the same with the garlic. Doh!
Anyway, I started with one of those massive 110 oz can of Bush’s chili beans I keep on hand (This one with a best by date of 2021!)—perfect for a big batch—and paired it with turkey sausage and rice. Overall, I’m trying to find a rice and beans recipe that uses both staples and tastes good with a minimum amount of ingredients. Because I wanted to get a full freeze dry load (15lbs for me, 5 trays), I actually used 2 10-quart crock pots and did 2 full batches.
Each used 2.75 cups of uncooked rice (about 10 years old in my food storage!), which I cooked separately as the rest was simmering, and I went for more spices than I ever have (I had AI pick me out some spices that might help give it a Cajun flair): cayenne, paprika, oregano, black pepper, thyme, and garlic. These spices align with the top 10 most commonly used ones (as I learned during another AI search recently), making them a practical choice for a food storage meal. Dried onions kept things simple, though you could easily use fresh onion. And the whole dish (all 19lbs worth!) came together in a bit over an hour.
I always check older cans prior to opening. The chili ones are showing some wear on the tops, but overall they looked good, though I did discard one with a bad dent. After opening the can (reminder: I need a new can opener) I could immediately tell they were still good, with no off smells, just chili beans in sauce.
The aroma as it simmered was great—rich, smoky, and savory, with the Thyme maybe being the odd note out, as its something I never use (I’m very plain Jane when it comes to spices). When I added the rice to the chili, it looked hearty and comforting, something I could easily eat after a hard day in any kind of survival scenario. I could very easily make this in a dutch oven over a fire or a big pot over one of my propane mini-stoves.
The first bite was a flavor (nuclear) explosion: I couldn’t tell whether it was the Thyme that seemed a bit overpowering, even over the cayenne. The turkey sausage added a bit of protein (more on that later), the beans were fine even 4 years out of date, and the spices were…spicy! Except for the Turkey Sausage which I bought this morning, it was made entirely from shelf-stable ingredients I already have in my food storage.
But: it was hot. Like, really hot. I know it wouldn’t be for many of you, but you have to remember that my idea of spicy is adding garlic pepper to my macaroni and cheese. And the 2nd bowl I had for dinner was even HOTTER. I don’t know if it setting for a few hours made it spicier or what, but it was like Mount Vesuvius and I burned the roof of my mouth. This was after I ended up adding a half cup of water to each Crock Pot while it was cooking; that helped, but I think next time I’ll dial the cayenne back to 1 tablespoon. I also think I need a bit more liquid; I’m going to try maybe a cup of chicken broth to give it a nice touch of oil on top.
Overall, this Spicy Turkey Sausage Chili with Rice is a win for my updated food storage plan. 15 of the 19 pounds made it into the freeze dryer, with one leftover tray in the freezer, and one pound in my belly.
It’s easy to make, uses ingredients that store well for years, and delivers on taste (if you can handle the heat). I’ll definitely tweak the spice level for my family’s palate, but it fits into my goal of creating a more diverse, practical one-year supply—less reliance on wheat-heavy recipes and more on comforting, familiar dishes like this. If you like a good plate of rice and beans, give this a whirl. If you have better spice substitutions than what I have, please let me know. Again, I was hoping to lean more to the Cajun side and while it was delicious I don’t know if I really succeeded at that.
One thing to remember: I’m not a cook, and I don’t even play one on TV. I’m a prepper just trying to be a bit more prepared and learn a bit more about flavors, spices, and what things go well together.
Ingredients:
2.75 cups uncooked rice
1 can (110 oz) chili beans
1 cup dried onion
4 tbsp garlic (minced or powder) (Should be 4 tsp or to taste, I’m just recreating what I did)
2 tbsp cayenne pepper (Should be 2 tsp or to taste)
1 tsp paprika
1 tsp oregano
1/2 tsp black pepper
1 tsp thyme
13oz pack of turkey sausage (I used the Kroger brand)
Instructions
Add Chili Beans to Crock Pot, putting it on high heat.
If you like your Turkey Sausage crispier, brown on the stove, keeping the pieces 1/4″ thick or smaller (for freeze drying), as well as halving or quartering if desired. If the texture doesn’t matter, you can cut and add to the Crock Pot and have it cook with the beans.
Add 1 cup dried onion and 4 tbsp garlic to the pot with the sausage. Stir for 2-3 minutes until fragrant. (If using dried garlic, you can add it with the spices in the next step.) These chili bean cans are big, so mixing thoroughly is important.
Add Spices: Stir in 2 tbsp cayenne pepper, 1 tsp paprika, 1 tsp oregano, 1/2 tsp black pepper, and 1 tsp thyme. Mix thoroughly.
Leave Crock Pot on high for 1 hour, stirring every 15 minutes or so, then turn to low.
In a separate pan (I did it in a Aroma Rice Cooker) Prepare the Rice:
Cook 2.75 cups of uncooked rice according to package instructions (typically 1:2 ratio of rice to water, so 5.5 cups water). The instructions for the Aroma cooker were odd…it suggested 1.3 cups of water to rice. This had the entire batch of rice end up pretty dry as well, which didn’t help the consistency of the whole dish. While the cooker wouldn’t hold a full 1:2, I will up the water to 1.5 cups/cup of rice the next time I try this to see if I can get a bit stickier rice.
Combine:
Add the finished rice to the Crock Pot, stir thoroughly. Turn to warm and serve.
Finished each Crock Pot ended up with 9.5lbs of food!
Notes
Servings: A 110 oz can of chili beans is big (about 12 cups), so this recipe serves 12-15 people a pretty hearty portion. I ate mine with Scoops. Part of this experiment for me is figuring out what I would actually do at the end of the world with these giant cans of Bush’s beans. Most likely I wouldn’t be the one cooking, but it never hurts to learn something.
Shelf-Stable: This recipe uses mostly pantry staples (dried onions, spices, canned beans, rice), making it ideal for food storage. I could just as easily freeze dry the turkey sausage as well (I think I have some tucked away in one of my totes) to have the complete recipe. However, if you don’t have a freeze dryer this recipe can get away without the turkey sausage. Honestly, 13oz wasn’t enough sausage for a recipe this big; I will double it next time (and end up with over 10lbs per crock pot!)
Adjusting Heat: The 2 tbsp cayenne makes this very spicy. I’ll reduce this to 1 tbsp next time, plus lower the garlic and see how that does.
It should be a little thinner, so next time I’m going to add at least a cup of chicken broth as it cooks, maybe 2. That should also give it a nice savory shine.
Back in the old days, I used to love getting into a good ole’ Facebook (or forums before that) row. Nowadays, it makes me sick to my stomach. As a father, I try to give good advice to my daughters; a consequence has been I try to take any advice that I give them (ugg!). Kindness, forgiveness, sharing, compassion etc. I really struggled with that last night.=)
I basically had a Facebook person telling me that I was lying when I said you could store food long term in 5 mil bags, and that I was a horrendous person trying to kill people because I had too many 5 mil bags on hand I couldn’t get rid of. Of course, most of us know you can store food in 5 mil bags because we’ve done it; I even have food from 2007 still stored in 3.5 mil and 4.3 mil bags. These products have been around for decades, and if they DIDN’T work, we’d know it. The Internets would be full of stories of failed bags and ruined food. And yeah, occasionally one of those stories pop up, and the culprit is usually user error. I had my own share of failures back almost 20 years ago when I first started and I didn’t know what I didn’t know; but again, that was on me, and not on the products involved. The good news is we also see the stories about folks opening up their Y2K food in 4.3 mil bags and its all still awesome.
So today, I’m going to break down the argument that there is something intrinsically better about a 7 mil bag that makes it so superior that 5 mil bags should never be used. You can find lots of this info in our video here, I’m just going to go into a bit more detail in this post.
Let me start with some premises:
1: Yes, the best 7 mil bags will be better than the best 5 mil bags. I think this is where some of this argument stems from. A good manufacturer of bags cares about both their products and the materials they are made from, and so our 7 mil bags are ‘better’ than our 5 mil bags from a technical standpoint, because there’s more quality material there. As examples, we add Nylon for tensile strength, we use real Mylar because its inherently stronger than the materials people replace it with. These things make a difference, and the testing shows it.
However, here’s the rub. Just because the 7 mil bag is ‘better’ by a few percentage points doesn’t mean its going to keep your food fresh any longer, because the amount of oxygen and moisture getting to your food is so small due to the incredible barrier properties of the primary barrier layer, which isn’t actually Mylar…its aluminum foil.
The harder truth for some folks to realize is that there are some 5 mil bags that are measurably better on some performance indicators than some 7 mil bags, depending on who is making the bag. It’s like how you can have a $25,000 automobile with better acceleration than a $40,000 automobile.
2: Aluminum foil – The best Mylar bags (4.3 mil and up usually) on the market use a .00035″ layer of aluminum foil (some also use a thinner .000285″ layer). It’s a common laminate, and used in all kinds of things, from reflective insulation to metallic tape. And in perfect condition, it has zero oxygen and zero moisture pass-through.This is the main reason why 5 mil bags have nearly identical barrier properties to 7 mil bags…they are both starting from a base of zero. Now, there is a measurement regarding the aluminum foil layer, ‘pinholes per meter squared’, and this is why when in actual use Mylar bags don’t have perfect scores when it comes to oxygen and moisture penetration. Both in the manufacturing process, as well as in the process of storing food, it has and can develop tiny pinholes. In many places on the Internet, you can see people freaking out about pinholes…but they are just part of the process, and they are inevitable. And this is why your Mylar bags have several other layers that are NOT prone to pinholes.
3: Other Layers – In our case, our 5 mil bags are made of 5 total layers, and our 7 mil bags have 7 total layers. We are the only Mylar bag seller we know still using Mylar as one of those layers. So why Mylar? It has good barrier qualities, exceptional tensile and mechanical strength and is very easy to work with. Others replace Mylar with lower-performing materials because it is expensive. LLDPE, the most common replacement for Mylar used by some of our competitors, is up to 500 times worse (yes, the numbers can be crazy) on OTR (Oxygen transmission) and up to 10 times worse on WVTR (Water vapor transmission) than actual BoPet. Our 7 mil bags (and now our Steelpak 4 mil bags) have a Nylon layer. Why? Because it too offers added puncture protection.
Most sellers sell 3-4 layer bags because they are cheaper to produce and offer sufficient protection for many uses. The good part for them is that a thick bag feels like a thick bag, however its made, which is why when you ask ‘what’s your favorite Mylar bag’ you get so many answers, because they all FEEL good and sturdy, and most folks think that correlates to being made from quality materials. However, ask other producers what their bags are made of, and WHY, and you’ll likely be greeted by blank stares. Most other sellers are white labelers, meaning they create an e-commerce business around selling a product that’s profitable. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But they are not Flexible Packaging companies, of which Discount Mylar Bags is the only one specializing in food storage packaging solutions. Even though most folks know us as Discount Mylar Bags, our official name is ShieldPro Flexible Packaging, because we design packaging solutions for both the retail and corporate marketplace. Our customers range from the Department of Defense, Oak Ridge National Laboratories, multiple university research labs (One which said our bags tested better for pharmaceuticals than some products designed for it), multiple food and supplement companies, the USAF (to protect parts from corrosion) and hundreds of others.
4: The Science – I know, I am very skeptical of that term as well. However, in this case, it is just the measurement of how products perform. I’m not even going to use the fancy OTR/WVTR numbers (though you are welcome to email me about them)…I’m going to break it down even further. So how much oxygen does a Mylar bag let through each year?
For a quality 5 mil 1.25 quart bag, the answer is .22cc/year.
For a quality 7 mil 1.25 quart bag, the answer is .19cc/year.
Both of those numbers are ridiculously low. If you are using a 300cc oxygen absorber from us, with around an 1100cc actual rating, and you assume 300cc of that capacity is used when you first seal the bag, you will have enough oxygen absorption for another 3,636 years with a 5 mil bag, and another 4,210 years with a 7 mil bag. So yes, that 7 mil bag will do better for you if you are an Egyptian pharaoh, but not so much if you’re a rural mom or dad like me.=) Of course, your food will break down long before you open the bag, but at least there still won’t be any oxygen in it a couple of centuries from now.
The numbers for moisture are actually closer than they are for Oxygen, and are essentially a rounding error, with no measurable improvement in MVTR between 5 and 7 mil and between .19 and .22cc/year.
So assuming you are using good bags, and good oxygen absorbers, you will get exactly the same results (unless you live 4000 years) using 5 mil bags instead of 7 mil.
I know this post and others like it can make folks feel a little weird. After all, the ‘Internet’ tells me to only use 7 mil bags! And the Internet is never wrong, right?
5: Yes, it feels WEIRD to think a great thick bag isn’t protecting your food much better than a thinner one, but it is true. Take a look at the below chart; these are various types of films used in various products. Please note the HUGE variations in these numbers, a difference by a factor of over 100,000 between some of the products. What films you use in manufacturing matters. However, please note that EVERY one of these films has its place, depending on the application. Some have a better melting point, some are easier to laminate, some bind better to aluminum or another material, etc. But the statement made to me last night, that a 5mil bag CAN’T ever be used to store food long term and that I must be trying to kill people by selling them, is just a statement made from a lack of information.
One type of plastic at 2 mil might not be able to hold up a 12oz cup of coffee, while another 2 mil film of a different plastic might hold up a brick. That’s how big a variation there can be. A plastic bag you put in your fridge might have an oxygen pass-through rate of 1000cc/day. A better one that is lighter than the first might have an OTR rate of 100cc/day, just through the use of different materials.
So if you’ve had a bad experience with a particular bag, please don’t make the assumption that every other product like it will also be bad. There’s as much difference in Mylar bags as there is between a Chevy and a Toyota in terms of quality of materials. And so just because your Ford broke down that time doesn’t mean even every Ford will, let alone another brand.
6: The one actual benefit of a good 7 mil bag: tensile strength and the ability to resist punctures. Yes, if you have puncture prone food, by all means use a 7 mil bag. But if you are only worried about longevity, you can’t go wrong with a 5 mil bag produced by a manufacturer who cares about a quality product, and there are several on the market.
So as I mentioned last time, I’m trying to update the LDS Food Storage Calculators of old into something that fits my family (and hopefully many other families) better.
To show you where I’m starting from, and where most of the other Food Storage Calculators are basing their numbers, here is an example: LDS Food Storage Calculator
Now, if you are a good cook and are prepared to use those ingredients, more power to you! But right off the bat, in the grains section half of it is devoted to Wheat. First, at least in our family, we have multiple Celiacs and gluten sensitive folks. Those sensitivities are also growing in the general population. So having that high a percentage of wheat is a likely recipe for requiring 2 extra outhouses. Plus, if its a grid-down situation, grinding wheat is a labor-intensive process, and you’ll be burning a good bunch of the calories you’ll get by baking bread.
The legumes is another minor challenge. Again, most families aren’t regularly cooking split peas or soybeans, so I’m adding more of what we eat, and removing things we don’t. As an example, I’m bumping the Peanut Butter up by a factor of 10. It’s easily portable and stores for a couple of years (if you don’t get the organic). One jar of peanut butter (1lb) is basically the equivalent of 1 short day’s worth of calories; you could live on it. Again, Peanuts and Peanut butter are both good storage foods, though like wheat, there’s a lot more people who are allergic to peanuts today than their were 40 years ago, so plan accordingly.
At the end, I hope to have a more usable point to start a conversation on food storage with a bunch of y’all!
If you have a favorite shelf stable (at least 1 year) food you’d like to consider us putting in the new calculator, please let me know!
Links: https://www.happypreppers.com/Pioneers.html This is an interesting link to a pioneer crossing the US in the 1800’s, and what they would take with them for a 6 month journey.
https://grandpappy.org/hfoodaff.htm He was the one who came up with the original ‘year’s worth of food’ recipe back in 2008 or so, and updated in for inflation for about 5 years. I can’t find the original list, but I’ve seen in online. You can find his new more modest lists here now. This list is also an inspiration for our new updated FSC. He has an older looking site, but it has a lot of cool stuff available.
Hey y’all, I know its been a while! God blessed us with an amazing new opportunity, and we’ve been pouring a lot of time and energy into that. One of the things that Discount Mylar Bags has taught us over the years is how to ship things. Since we started, we’ve shipped out over a million packages. Through a combination of providence and coincidence, we are now leveraging that skill set and shipping packages for a great local board game company. That includes their day to day shipments as well as their sometimes $2,000,000 Kickstarters.
Over the years, we’ve always believed in diversification as a form of prepping, because we’ve slowly been pushed off of Amazon by our lack of ‘Amazon Knowledge’. And nowadays, Amazon Knowledge is way more important than actually having a quality product. That’s why my wife and I live frugally, and her most common shopping trip is to Goodwill (This was also true in 2005, long before starting our businesses) . Our focus is our family and serving our community. We’ve opened a game store, started several online businesses dealing with collectibles or gaming accessories, and constantly look out for untapped value in the marketplace. (I found another amazing product, a patent coming off its 20 years, that I hope we’ll be offering before the end of the year!)
So what’s the problem with Amazon, you may ask? Well, the main thing is that the best products can very easily be overshadowed by slick-looking, well marketed products. A few years back, Amazon had to start protecting Name Brand items such as Revlon, Norelco, or Samsung, because no-name white-labelers were just better at marketing than even long-running, ultra-quality name brands, and the good products would be buried 10 pages back. You may remember those days. Nowadays, you’ll usually find a Name Brand on page 1, but you’ll still also find 900 knockoffs from Alibaba also with tens of thousands of positive reviews.
I constantly tell my friends who have their own businesses, or want to start one, that the product you are selling isn’t that important to whether your business is successful or not. Success in many fields today is about whether you can market yourself and your product successfully. I’ll be the first to admit I’ve been only modestly successful at my marketing efforts. Whether its our local game store or drive-in, an ecommerce store, a podcast, a blog, or a board game, having a great product is only the very first step in having a successful business. BUT…and this is the crux…if you learn how to drive eyeballs and sales, you can make ANY product successful. Just take a look online and you’ll see the proof of this every day.
My anecdotal story to go with this: for about 2 years I tried 5 different electric razors off of Amazon. This was back in 2016 or so, a few years before the absolute wave of knock-off brands. All 5 razors sucked. I got so fed up because I couldn’t find a decent razor on Amazon, even though every one I bought had thousands of positive reviews. Finally, I went to my local Walgreens and bought a bright-yellow Norelco, the only one they had. 7 years later, and that’s still the one I’m using. Sometimes the name brands got their brand name because they were just good, and reliable. I bought a 15 year old hose off of eBay, because the new generation of stretchy hoses I kept getting from Amazon are just terrible.
This is the place where we’ve found ourselves. My company has the highest rated absorbers and strongest bags (and that’s not just advertising, that’s tested), and we’re back on page 20 behind products that are measurably worse in every way. Many of our competitors have given away thousands of products in exchange for 5 star reviews so it looks like they are much better products than they are, and that’s just something I’m not going to participate in. Now, we’re not folks to dwell on things, so we still do the best we can via our website (Discount Mylar Bags), but the writing is on the wall at least when it comes to the retail market which is dominated by Amazon. We’re doing OK on the wholesale side, selling to companies who use our products to package everything from jerky and horse supplements to freeze-dried foods and archival documents, but even that is a long way from the Halcyon days of COVID when we tripled our staff and moved an insane amount of product (ironically, it was that year of sales that triggered all the computer programs to tell people to start selling prepper supplies).
That was a pretty long intro to say this: if you want the best, highest-rated Mylar bags and oxygen absorbers, you won’t find them on Amazon without digging down to page 20. Take a look at this chart (click it to see a larger version):
Now, if you’ve spent some time on Amazon, you’ll recognize most or all of these brands. One of these brands, whose absorbers don’t even absorb their rated capacity of 300cc, has thousands of 5 star reviews, and most of their products are rated 4.5 stars or above overall. The highest rated product (ours), which beats the number 2 brand by almost 35%, can barely be found. That’s the world we’re living in now. Yes, this chart shows what you think it does: our 300cc absorbers tested at 1103cc actual absorption, or nearly 400% their rated capacity. I’m convinced that one of the companies testing under 300cc actual absorption has been selling the wrong sized absorbers, FOR THREE YEARS. And they still have thousands of great reviews. Of course, they’ll never admit that, and they rabidly attack folks on Youtube who suggest that their products are terrible (which they are).
That’s the thing, many of these companies have no idea what Mylar bags or oxygen absorbers are or what they do…they found them via a computer program that told them ‘these things sell good on Amazon, you should buy a bunch and make a listing’. Many of them are simply choosing the least expensive bags and absorbers they can find, relabeling it with their name, and marketing the crap out of it. And sadly, it works. The next chart is for Mylar Bags. Same story, ours are better by a long way. I’ve got MOCON permeation testing (OTR and MVTR) in the works, and I fully expect those results to be consistent as well.
But this is my commitment: I’ll keep showing the charts and information, and hope that a few make the choice to buy Just Better Bags. We’ve been here 13 years, which is 7 years longer than any other company on these lists except Harvest Right, and 10 years longer than several. I hope we’ll be here 13 more and one of my daughters takes it over and runs it better than I do.
