How to store rice and beans...

[no guns here]

I know that rice and beans both store easily but what's the best way?  White rice or brown?  Just in a sealed plastic tub?  Vacuum packed or what?
 
NGH

[BUGEYE]

I had been thinking of packing both together in 5gal buckets.  I will do it this winter when the house is real dry and then seal with a 30yr silicone or something.
that beans and rice combo is delicious.  even without hot sausage.

[briarpatch]

If you know a Mormon have them take you to the Biships storehouse and you can, can your beans and rice. they will last 30+ years. They have a lot of stuff you are able to can such as dried vegtables and pastas.  From I have canned and eaten they have the best quality of any one I know.
You have to buy the product there to be able to can it.

[mcwoodduck]

I buy rice from Costo, I like the Bismati rice.  The 20 pounds usually last about 2 years.  I fill standard air tight storage containers, I like the stainless steel ones with the see through plastic lid.  The 20 pound bag fills three of the larger containers.
I would store white rice.  Brown rice has the bran layer still on the grain and the bran has an oil in it that will go rancid over time.
I buy brown rice in small batches, keep it in the freezer amd use it when wanted.  While it is more flavorful and healthier for you it takes two to three times as long to cook, in an ergency it is going to take more fuel to cook. 
I have some beans, but not a lot and keep them in sealed mason jars that I get from pasta sauces I also get at costco.  buy the 32 Oz sauces and use them.  Clean the jars and lids and use for dry goods.
Also go get the Knorr bullion cubes.  Dislove the cube in 2 Cups of water.  Tap water us usually warm enough.  At the same time it is softening take a table spoon of olive oil and heat in a pot.  Add 1 Cup of rice and toast and dump in the bullion.  Bring to a boil turn off and cover.  Let stand for 20 Min.  Fluff with a fork and serve.

[reliquary]

+1 on the thing about brown rice.  Great-tasting for normal times, but the oil goes rancid quickly unless stored in the freezer.
 
I put my bags of white rice in the freezer for a couple of weeks, to kill anything that might have gotten into them.  After defrosting, I store them in snaplid 5-gal buckets with dessicant.  The longest I've kept any is two years.  No problems.
 
Bulk beans should be stored in an inert atmosphere for best results.  I buy them in 10 & 25 pound bags.  Put a fist-sized chunk of dry ice in the bottom of a snap-lid 5-gal bucket.  Dump the beans loose on top of the dry ice (fill the bucket) and put the lid on loose for a couple of minutes to let some of the ice sublimate and drive the air out.  Then seal the lid.  One source I use says they will keep for "several years" that way.
 
To keep smaller bags of beans for regular use, I freeze them the same way I do the rice and store them in the bags they come in, in snaplid buckets.  They've kept for a year so far.  We use them pretty fast.  I've also sealed them in vacuum-seal bags (the heat-seal kind) and that has kept them for a year so far, as well.  Still experimenting.

[AtlLaw]

I put my bags of white rice in the freezer for a couple of weeks, to kill anything that might have gotten into them.

um...     won't the boiling water when you cook 'em do that?   
 
 

[reliquary]

Hi, AtlLaw...
 
Yeah, cooking will kill the little critters. 
 
My goal is to keep them (particularly weevils) from hatching out and eating everything in the bag while the food is stored.   If you're going for long-term storage, you may not see the stuff for several months or even a year or so...plenty of time for bugs to turn a bag of food into more bugs and bug poop.
 
Of course, a FEW weevils just gives you a little animal protein, if you can stand the crunching noise between your teeth. 
 
 

[Casull]

Bulk beans should be stored in an inert atmosphere for best results.  I buy them
in 10 & 25 pound bags.  Put a fist-sized chunk of dry ice in the bottom of a
snap-lid 5-gal bucket.  Dump the beans loose on top of the dry ice (fill the
bucket) and put the lid on loose for a couple of minutes to let some of the ice
sublimate and drive the air out.  Then seal the lid.  One source I use says they
will keep for "several years" that way.

You might want to consider putting your beans in first and then your dry ice on top.  I would lay a piece of  paper towel or something on top of the beans and then set the dry ice on top of that.  Since carbon dioxide (gaseous form of dry ice) is heavier than air, it will sink to the bottom of your container and force the air out.  When nearly gone, remove the last bit of dry ice and put the lid on.  That way, you'll know when the dry ice is nearly gone and that time enough has passed for the air to be forced out.  If you seal it too soon, your containers may pop as it evaporates.

[BUGEYE]

publix sells dry-ice but it's in large blocks.  and how do you get it home without it evaporating?
I don't want it in the cab with me and the camper shell gets really hot inside.

[reliquary]

Casull-thanks for the suggestion.  I'll try that next load.  It doesn't seem to generate enough pressure to blow lids off buckets and it's pretty easy to tell when it's almost through sublimating.  Putting it on the bottom, it's easy to tell when it has replaced most of the oxygen...starts kinda "fogging" over the edge.
 
Bugeye-Some Krogers have it (I didn't ask them why) and a lot of butcher shops do as well, especially those that cater to hunters.  Call around.  If you make friends with the owners, they'll chip off a chunk and sell it by the pound.  I buy about twice what I need and carry it home in a thick Styrofoam ice chest, the type meds are shipped in through the mail.
 
 

[BIG Dog454]

I place beans or rice in a quart mason jar, put lid on loose, place in oven at 200 -220 deg F for 20-30 min, remove jar tighten lid and store
I have keep this way for 3 yrs so far and no spoilage.  A quart is 4 cups of grain.
BD

[mcwoodduck]

publix sells dry-ice but it's in large blocks.  and how do you get it home without it evaporating?
I don't want it in the cab with me and the camper shell gets really hot inside.

Just call me Captain obvious.  But I would put it in a good cooler.  Make sure the cooler is dry.

[BUGEYE]

thanks y'all,  but now I'm kinda leaning toward bigdogs solution.

[reliquary]

BigDog & Bugeye:
 
What the heck...why not?  I went for 5-gal buckets because that's more convenient for my storage closet & pantry.  Whatever works, brothers; just be ready if the hard times hit.
 
Now that you've brought that up, my wife took some antique Mason jars several years ago and put different kinds/colors of beans in them for decoration around the kitchen.  Five or six years later, when she tired of that look and had me dump the beans out, they were still good.  With no prep whatever.  Go figure.
 
I believe in Murphy's Laws and try to leave as little to chance as possible.

[Junior1942]

I store rice in a plastic 2L soft drink bottle.  I squeeze the sides of the bottle and expell some of the air, then tighten the lid.  It's then under a soft vacuum.  It lasts about two years--unless I eat it all--until I throw it away not because it's bad but because....  I have one of those CO2 muzzleloader unloaders, and I used to shoot it in the bottle and replace most of the air with CO2.  Now, I just use the partial vacuum, and it works just as well.  Both the vacuum and the CO2 methods prevent weevils.

[BUGEYE]

BigDog & Bugeye:
 
What the heck...why not?  I went for 5-gal buckets because that's more convenient for my storage closet & pantry.  Whatever works, brothers; just be ready if the hard times hit.
 
Now that you've brought that up, my wife took some antique Mason jars several years ago and put different kinds/colors of beans in them for decoration around the kitchen.  Five or six years later, when she tired of that look and had me dump the beans out, they were still good.  With no prep whatever.  Go figure.
 
I believe in Murphy's Laws and try to leave as little to chance as possible.

well your experience make me feel better.  I'm storing stuff in a hutch my wife bought for that purpose.

[Winter Hawk]

We had beans and rice in the big peanut butter jars, I have used those for storing them for years.  Then one day we had these little moth things flying around the kitchen.  I started hunting for their source and found that all the jars of beans AND the jars of rice were crawling with larvae.  We ended up throwing out a good year's worth of food.  Since then we keep them in the freezer to kill off the little nasties!

-Kees-

[mcwoodduck]

Oh I forgot to mention you can vacume seal stuff using a freezer ziploc bag and a full pot of water or the kitchen sink.  Put what you want in the bag you need four hands for this.  One person submerges the bag from the bottom cornors to the zipper the second person zips.  The water pressure will force out all the air.  I do this when I cut steaks  and roasts off a whole joint of meat or cut up whole chickens into parts.  Dry the bags and stack in the freezer.  Lasts about 3 months with meat.  Dry goods like Rice can last longer.  Flat quart Zip lock bags can fit in a 50 caliber ammo can for long storage.  The idea being that you do not have a large quantity in one bag incase of something going wrong (bugs, moisture, rodents, breakage, accident)

[no guns here]

hmmm... and a quart is a lot of dry rice or beans.  Actually that's probably more than a meal if there are only two/three people.  Seems like a way to pack up a bunch of meal sized quantities.  I can see it being a pain to use 5 gallon buckets of rice or beans.  I'm thinking quart mason jars full and then a bunch of extra flats for reuse of the jars later.
 
 
NGH

[BUGEYE]

I'm still gonna use BigDogs plan.  200 degrees for 30 minutes should kill the varmits, shouldn't it??

[Lloyd Smale]

would canning jars and a pressure cooker work?

[mcwoodduck]

I'm still gonna use BigDogs plan.  200 degrees for 30 minutes should kill the varmits, shouldn't it??

Try a small batch first and see if you like what it does to the rice and beans.  Toasting/ roasting the rice may cook it and then it does not cook right again or has a different consistancy than you are used to.
 

[BUGEYE]

I'm still gonna use BigDogs plan.  200 degrees for 30 minutes should kill the varmits, shouldn't it??

Try a small batch first and see if you like what it does to the rice and beans.  Toasting/ roasting the rice may cook it and then it does not cook right again or has a different consistancy than you are used to.

hmmm,  you could be right.  I'll back off to about 125.  If you drive out the moisture that should keep bugs from hatching.  I hope.

[mcwoodduck]

Internal temp of 140 degrees (scalding temp for water) will strelize the product.  I would stick a probe thermometer in one of the jars filled with water and wait till the temp hit 140  and turn off the oven and let it coast back down.   I have a digital thermometer that has a probe and a head that is out of the oven.  I can set a temp.  When the alarm goes off, turn off the oven.   Put the lids on the products you want to store.  Just add the  sealing ring  to the tops and store when cool.  Good time to do it would be after cooking dinner in the oven when it is already hot and turn off the oven and let it cool over night.  20 to 40 minutes at 140 degrees will kill any microbe or critter in the jar and should not alter the product.  but test a small batch before you go into full production with 20 gallons of beans or rice.

[BUGEYE]

hey thanks,  140 should do it.  I know it gets that hot in my truck.
I'll try a pint of each and then try cooking them in a couple of weeks.

[powderman]

We've stored dry beans in gal jars for many years now and never had bugs in them, but freezing should kill eggs. I have a gal of rice thats been in a jar for 11 years and looks ok. Like a lot of others before y2k we stored a lot of xtra stuff. Filled a 50 cal ammo can with ramen noodles. A couple yrs later opened the can and the pkgs were empty except for dust. We didn't freeze them first. One thing I've had bugs in was unopened boxes of instant barley. We always freeze bags of flour before dumping in a 5 gal bucket, also layer bay leaves in the bucket. Have never had meal worms or any other bugs after doing this. POWDERMAN. 

[srussell]

would canning jars and a pressure cooker work?

   yes

[Lloyd Smale]

how long would you put dry beans and rice in the pressure cooker and at what pressure?

[Cornbelt]

Someone here at GBO gave me a recipie for killing weevil in acorns: 120 degrees for 40 minutes. I reckon a weevil is a weevil. And a dead one is a good one.

[powderman]

After this thread we decided to check some stored dry foods. We found 2 big bags of oatmeal full of bugs, another large container of dried carrots, a box of bread crumbs too, full of bugs. Also found 2 gal bags of dried turnips with bugs in them barley too.  Our dried onions were ok but put them, some lentils, and more carrots in the freezer where they will stay for several days. Will do the same with dried squash, green beans, and all other dried items. Never seen a bug in rice or dry beans but we aren't taking any more chances. A lot of work goes into raising, processing, drying and storing these foods, don't want to lose anymore. There may well come a time where a handful of dried anything might make the difference between eating and doing without. This has been a good thread, I've learned and enjoyed. We have 5 or 6 kinds of dried beans, lintels, split peas, and blackeyed peas, so we might just put them in the oven for 1/2 hr or so, don't think I can hurt them, then after cooling put them back in the gal jars. Going to try drying some tomatos next week. POWDERMAN.