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How long do dried goods actually stay good for?

 
gardener
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I'm assessing my food storage right now. I'm trying to figure out how long I have until certain things have to be rotated out. Everything is kept in food grade buckets and totes. I'm talking beans, whole grains like wheat berries, and flour. My question is, how long are they "good" for? Obviously it depends on how you define good, but I  suppose I have two tiers:

Tier 1: Tastes good/fresh
Tier 2: Edible/provides some nutrition (emergency food)


Thoughts?


 
master pollinator
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In my experience, the bigger the seed the longer it keeps. Beans, peas, lentils (pretty much all the pulses) are good over the long haul as long as you are keeping out humidity and bugs...3-4 years at least. Corn is probably the best of the grains, with the flint types the champs. Wheat, barley, oats and rice usually start to taste a little "tired" to me if they go beyond 12 months. Germination tests are one way of assessing how these are holding up. If they still have high viability, then the nutrient content is probably still good as well.

As the oil content in the seed goes up, its shelf life goes down. Sunflower, pumpkin, sesame and similar seeds seem to go 6-12 months max for us. Raw nuts vary...walnuts, macadamias and hazels still taste pretty good a year after harvest if we leave them in the shells, but shelled nuts go rancid a lot faster. Roasted nuts don't go rancid as fast as raw ones.

Milling really shortens the life of grains. Wheat keeps well for a year or more easily, but whole wheat flour starts to get unappealing after a few weeks.
 
pollinator
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Recently I found some 10 year old commercially dried chickpeas at the back of the cupboard. They looked fine so I tried sprouting some of them - success! I then decided to try them in various recipes and they were fine. Note to self: rotate your stock.
 
Phil Stevens
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Ten years. Nice! I have read anecdotal stories of corn, bean and pumpkin seed that was stored in sealed clay vessels in desert caves or cliff dwellings being grown out several decades later. I bet garbanzos would last that long under the right conditions, because they are pretty bulletproof.
 
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10 years is my minimum guess for well stored beans. I have never had any I wasn't pleased with come out of storage, and I have stored them for many years, including some that fell and got lost, and everything has been good. I think it may have a lot to do with a lot of factors about how it's stored, not just what containers, but how dry was it when put in them, what variety of bean, where did it come from, where have the containers been stored, etc.
I think 10 years is minimum for assuming dried beans are ok.

Whole grains last much longer than flour, but flour stored well holds a very long time. I pack my flour into containers VERY tightly to exclude as much air as I can in between the bits of flour. I have never had bad flour come out of my storage either, I get at least 5 years out of commercial stone ground whole wheat flour.

Rice, barley, etc again, I have never had bad come out of my storage, with dates about 8-10 years old.

Basically, the only things I have ever had bad out of my storage involved damaged containers, as long as the containers are intact, I have had no issues. I check everything well as it comes out, just to be safe, but have had no issues. But I am very OCD about how I put it into those containers.
 
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