Category:
Introduction

On Keeping Dried Food

Dried foods have excellent storage prospects for the most part, but must be protected from rot by exclusion of moisture, and also kept from simply being eaten by insects and their larvae. The handiest, most reusable, cheapest, most inert, and adaptive containers are glass jars saved from the recycling box. If you believe that your dry staples have already been infested ere you brought them home, let them spend a night or two in the freezer. Just one thing; keep such foods hermetically sealed before and after this chilling treatment. Upon being taken from the cold, condensation would form on the foodstuffs if they were open to the air.

One pest in particular can be very difficult to contain; the adult meal moth, brown in colour, seems to be able to climb into your grains and legumes through apertures that would daunt a roach. The best approach is to purchase most things as you need them, but as this is impractical, do make a point of rotating stored items, so that they don't sit around. Most comestibles do not benefit from being stored for any length of time; changes in texture, flavour and nutrition are to be expected.

The proverbial 'cool, dry place' may end up having to be your refrigerator, but that is better than nothing.

Of course, buying produce that is already old when you get it is easy enough to do. When you find a certain merchant's goods to be cooking unevenly, or taking a long time to cook or soak, make a mental note to shop elsewhere.

Table of Contents

More Intro:

On Frugality | On Cookery | On the Board | Batterie de Cuisine | Keeping it Fresh | On Nightshades | On Water | On Sourdough | On Pizza | Arthritis in the Kitchen |