Grains and Flours

A whole grain is a seed, sealed by nature, and it keeps for decades. Flour is that seed broken open, and the clock starts the day it's milled: white flour, with the oily germ removed, lasts a year on the shelf; whole wheat flour and cornmeal, germ included, a few months before they go bitter. That one fact organizes the whole grain store: keep the grain whole, keep a mill, and keep only the flour you will use this season. The details for the two biggest are on the white rice and wheat berries pages.

For the deep store: hard red or hard white wheat berries, white rice, field corn or popcorn (for cornmeal), and rolled oats, in 25 and 50 pound bags from a bulk or restaurant supplier, packed the week they come home. For the working pantry: white all-purpose and bread flour in the 10 pound bag, replaced as used, and small bags of whole wheat flour and cornmeal kept in the freezer. A hand grain mill is the piece of equipment that makes the whole-grain store usable without power.

Cool, dark and dry, in something airtight. The original bag or box is fine for the months you will use it in; for the years, the answer is the same as for rice: a Mylar bag with an oxygen absorber inside a food-grade bucket, which keeps out oxygen, moisture, light and every insect egg that came home from the mill. The Mylar ranking says which foods take an absorber and which do not.

Flour is the one that disagrees: it's fine in Mylar with an absorber for the long term, but the bag you bake from lives in an airtight canister or the freezer. Whole wheat flour and cornmeal go in the freezer from the day they come home. Freezing any grain or flour for four days at 0°F kills the weevil eggs that came from the mill; let it come to room temperature sealed before it goes into a bucket.

Weevils are small dark beetles; their sign in flour is clumping, a gray cast, and webbing from the moths that follow. The grain or flour goes and the shelf gets cleaned. A musty smell is moisture and mold is next. Whole wheat flour, cornmeal and brown rice that smell bitter, sharp or like old paint have gone rancid; they are not dangerous in a loaf but they taste of it. Whole grains that are dry and clean smelling are fine at any age; a sample that sprouts or grinds to a sweet-smelling flour is proof.

Grain is the calorie base: about 1,600 calories a pound dry for wheat, rice and corn. The field guide's planning numbers come to roughly 40 to 45 pounds of dry staples per person per month, most of it grain. A hand mill turns a cup of wheat berries into a cup and a half of flour in a few minutes, and fresh flour bakes bread, flatbread, pancakes and the hardtack that keeps. Whole wheat berries also cook like rice (soaked, then simmered an hour) and sprout in a jar in three days for the green vegetable a winter store lacks.

Whole grains and the hand mill are the no-power bakery. Flour in the freezer thaws and is fine; use it first. A skillet flatbread on a camp stove needs flour, water, salt and ten minutes, which is the bread recipe to learn before the day you need it.

Shelf-life figures are from the Survival Foods field guide; fridge, freezer and pantry times are from the USDA cold and pantry storage charts. Run the look, smell, taste check before eating anything past its date.