Wheat Berries

Wheat berries are whole wheat kernels, the seed with nothing removed, and they are the longest-keeping calorie there is: up to 30 years sealed in Mylar with an oxygen absorber. Flour goes stale in months; the berry it came from waits for decades. The catch is that a bucket of wheat is not food until it's milled, cooked or sprouted, so this page is as much about the mill as the grain.

Hard red winter wheat is the traditional bread wheat, high protein, strong flavor. Hard white wheat bakes the same loaf with a milder taste that people used to store flour accept more easily, and it's the one to buy if you are starting. Soft white wheat is for pastry, biscuits and crackers, lower in protein. Buy cleaned, dry grain (under 10 percent moisture) from a food-storage supplier or a farm, in 25 to 50 pound bags, and pack it the week it arrives. Then buy the mill: a hand mill with steel or stone burrs that will grind fine flour without electricity, and an electric one if you want speed while the grid is up.

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.

A 5 gallon bucket holds about 35 pounds of wheat with a 2000 cc absorber. Mill only what you will bake with in a week or two; fresh whole wheat flour has the germ oil in it and begins to turn in days at room temperature. Freezing the grain for four days before packing kills weevil eggs if you skip the absorber.

Weevils are small dark beetles that bore out of the kernel, leaving a hole; their sign is holes, dust and webbing, and a buggy bag goes. Moisture shows as clumping, a musty smell, and mold. Sound wheat is hard, dry, and smells faintly sweet when a handful is crushed; a few kernels put on a damp towel will sprout in two days, which is the proof that a decades-old bucket is still alive and good.

A pound of wheat is about 1,500 calories and 60 grams of protein, and it is the calorie base of the field guide's 40 to 45 pounds of dry staples per person per month. A cup of berries mills into about a cup and a half of flour. Fresh whole wheat flour makes bread, flatbread, pancakes and hardtack; it absorbs more water than white flour and needs a little more of it. The berries also cook whole, soaked overnight and simmered about an hour, into a chewy grain that stands in for rice, and sprout in a jar in three days into a green vegetable with vitamin C the dry store lacks. Cracked in the mill on a coarse setting they are a hot cereal.

A hand mill and a camp stove turn a bucket of wheat into bread with no electricity. Fifteen minutes of grinding is a loaf's worth of flour; it's real work, which is the argument for an electric mill while the power is on and a hand mill for when it's not. Sprouting needs nothing but a jar and water.

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.