Food storage

These pages deal with keeping food through a long interruption and turning stored staples into meals people will actually eat. The practical base is a list of pantry habits that tend to get overlooked: keep the temperature steady rather than merely cool, move dry goods into food-grade containers, guard stored seed against damp, watch shelf life once a package has been opened, and keep mice out.

Powdered milk gets two pages, one on bringing nonfat powder closer to whole milk and one on making a simple fresh cheese from it. Another covers raising bread once the stored yeast packets have gone flat. Three are traditional keeping foods: pemmican, made from dried meat and rendered fat; pinole, a toasted corn flour with a long history in Mexico and the American Southwest; and powdered eggs.

Where a method printed in 2010 and today’s guidance from the USDA or the National Center for Home Food Preservation disagree, the page says so and follows the guidance.