Posted on 08/18/2011 12:19:26 PM PDT by Kartographer
My SHTF food preps include mylar bags, #10 cans, MREs and canned goods. In this article and video ware going to discuss making up 20 mylar bags of rice, beans, oatmeal,,,,, and various other items.
(Excerpt) Read more at survivalistboards.com ...
Thanks.
I haven’t heard of the bay leaves trick. Care to elaborate?
That is a great price compared to the online stores and they charge shipping.
Also check out Honeyville Grains
$4.49 ships your order no matter how big. Next time the have their 10% off coupon I will post.
We also use a Food Saver to vacumn pack dried goods we buy at the grocery store. We take a bag of rice or beans and just put the whole bag in a food saver bag and then vacumn pack it.
We also make up 5 gallon buckets of wheat, oats, rice, 9 grain cereal, ezekiel mix, and different beans. We get the buckets at the grocery store bakery for $1 each and then line them with Mylar bags and put an oxygen absorber in each bag, seal it up and put on the lid. We also keep a few cases of MRE’s and #10 cans of freeze dried veggies and TVP meat.
OK. I get that mylar bags are the way to go.
Anyone have a source for them and the equipment to vacuum and seal them?
To me this is kind of like learning to can. That I have down cold, but an totally unfamiliar with this mylar bag stuff.
Can you add me to your ping list?
Thank you.
I’ve read several places that bugs don’t like bay leaves. So I buy them by the pound every few years and add them to buckets. I don’t know if that’s why I don’t have bugs, but I don’t have any. Also I never buy small boxes of grains like oatmeal, crackers, etc. They’re much more likely to harbor or attract bugs than 25# bags of stuff, that I re-pack into buckets as soon as I can.
Beans can last for years but they do get harder to cook after a few years.
I read somewhere they took old hard beans and ran them through a grinder then soaked them and cooked them and it worked!
I vacumm my stuff with in food saver bags cut to fit inside the mylar. Vacuum them with the machine with a oxygen absober and then seal the mylar with an old iron and a piece of scrap 2X2. Also you can get an attachement and vacuum seal canning jars as well! I use that to vacuum stuff I only need to use a little at a time. I did spices, dehydrated peppers, Nestle Quick (Makes Podwered milk drinkable!)I brought a dehydrator and dehydrate a lot of frozen vegteables and then put them in the jar with a oxygen absorber and the vacuum them shut!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DtlcfKNERk
I’m preaching my lifestyle here, but for the people who can do it, there are a lot of cheap fixer-upper sailboats out there...home, escape shuttle, cheap living and rent free if you choose to anchor out...I am presently in a Florida river and catch fish, crabs, I’m in a waterfowl flyway with a year-round duck population, and there’s a swampy forest upriver absolutely infested with wild pigs. Never starve.
My friend just sold a Seidelman 30’ that needed a lot of work for $2800...I saw a Pearson 30’ for $3400...and there’s a hull-only 45’ at a marina nearby that the owner can’t afford to fix up, he said if someone threw him $5k they can have it.
Its better to go on foot to docks, marinas and whatnot and talk to people, that’s where the real deals are.
My plastic bags aren’t porous.
No air gets in or out, not only that, they are triple layered and I have stored food in the bottom of a frozen over lake without issue before.
Maybe the reason your plastic was porous was the opening not being heat sealed and you didn’t fill the package with nitrogen before you vacuumed it and the existing air in the package was what killed your food.
If you put fresh vegs in a properly packed plastic container, you can even keep them fresh for 8 weeks as long as they are in a cool dark place.
I have never heard of using mylar. There must be some other advantage, I know they are incredibly thin and strong for their thickness. Maybe they have some chemical reaction with the air in the back, I know silver has a reaction to killing all sorts of microbes. Maybe mylar has some silver in it or the one you use has been coated with silver.
I noticed that lots of mylar contains these silver coatings.
Food saver bags don’t last very long. They get very brittle.
I’ve sealed mylar with a vacuum sealer, but it’s not easy and requires putting the mylar bag inside a sealer bag then sealing the whole works and then removing the mylar....a lot of trouble. Mylar works best (as far as I know) with o2 absorbers. Seal right and left with a small opening left over, then drop in absorber and seal middle...with hand sealer iron.
The silver is a layer of metal flim the metal doesn’t allow air to leak into the bag over time. It is this metal flim that make the bags idea for long term food storage.
Take a regular ballon fill it up with helium and take a mylar balloon and fill it at the same time. watch which one last longer.
What I was trying to figure out if it was due to silver.
Lots of the mylar has a dusting of silver to a full coat on it.
Silver is an excellent anti-microbial. If that is the reason for it working so good, then maybe you could just get silver doped PET instead.
Not really fair, the helium destroys organics like the latex, put helium in a mylar bag with food in it and watch what happens to the food.
The silver in the mylar is to add some strength to the material and make it formable or reflective depending on the amounts. Silver is one of the few anti-microbial that will kill any microbe and still is food service safe.
But if you are buying mylar just to get the benefit of silver, you can buy the silver in plastic and get the same affect without the cost of mylar.
I just can’t see the benefit from the mylar itself.
BoPET (Biaxially-oriented polyethylene terephthalate) is a polyester film made from stretched polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and is used for its high tensile strength, chemical and dimensional stability, transparency, reflectivity, gas and aroma barrier properties and electrical insulation.
A variety of companies manufacture boPET and other polyester films under different brand names. In the UK and US, the most well-known trade names are Mylar, Melinex and Hostaphan.
SNIP
Biaxially oriented PET film can be metallized by vapor deposition of a thin film of evaporated aluminum, gold, or other metal onto it. The result is much less permeable to gases (important in food packaging) and reflects up to 99% of light, including much of the infrared spectrum. For some applications like food packaging, the aluminized boPET film can be laminated with a layer of polyethylene, which provides sealability and improves puncture resistance. The polyethylene side of such a laminate appears dull and the PET side shiny.
Other coatings, such as conductive indium tin oxide (ITO), can be applied to boPET film by sputter deposition
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BoPET
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