Long Term Food Storage Ideas: Beans

Do you have a long-term food store for your family? Long-term food storage is one of the easiest ways to prepare for any kind of emergency, such as a bug-out, weather emergency, or even for weeks when you may not be able to get to the grocery store – such as during a long illness or after having a baby. In many cases, purchasing foods in advance can help you save money throughout the year as well.

How To Choose Items for Food Storage

The key to building a successful long-term food store is choosing appropriate foods to store. The foods you choose should keep for several years, be relatively easy to prepare, provide nutritional value, and consist of foods your family will actually eat. If your family will eat beans, they are one of the best foods that you can have in your food store.

Learn more: How To Buy and Cook Dried Beans

Dried Beans… Give ‘Em a Try, You’ll Grow to Love Them!

Dried beans intimidate many women because they can seem difficult to prepare. In actuality, cooking dried beans is not difficult, as long as you give it enough time. Here’s a list from Happy Preppers of things you can do with dry beans.

Learn more: Rehydrating and Using Dried Soybeans in Meals

Beans also keep well for several years, and contain vital nutrients that your body needs, such as protein, complex carbohydrates, and other vitamins and minerals that your body needs to stay healthy.

Another benefit of using beans in your long-term food store is the cost. Beans are some of the most cost-effective foods available. You can purchase 20 to 50 pounds of dried beans for just a few dollars. Choose several varieties of beans so that your family doesn’t get bored of one single bean flavor. Some of my favorite bean varieties are pinto beans, black beans, and navy beans.

Beans can turn into a wide variety of recipes and foods. You can cook traditional bean soup, use them as a side dish, grind them into flour, mash and spread onto tortillas, use in casseroles as a filler, sprout them to use in salads, and use them as a replacement for meat. You can even use beans to make vegetarian burgers. There really is almost no end to the uses for dried beans.

Down-home, yet haute, soul-satisfyingly hearty, valued, versatile deeply delectable, healthful, and inexpensive to boot, there’s nothing a bean can’t do—and nothing that Crescent Dragonwagon can’t do with beans. Bean By Bean: A Cookbook: More than 175 Recipes for Fresh Beans, Dried Beans, Cool Beans, Hot Beans, Savory Beans, Even Sweet Beans! (Amazon)

How To Store Dried Beans

If you do decide to use beans in your long-term food store, make sure you store them properly. Beans should be placed in air tight containers. You can place them in large five gallon buckets, or store them by single servings. Ask your local grocery stores and restaurants if you can have some 5 gallon buckets when they are done with them.  If your storage containers are not clear, make sure that you write the name of the bean on the container so that you don’t mix your beans with other foods or varieties of beans.

Global Post has detailed instructions for long term storage of beans and rice.

Are you ready to add beans to your long-term storage stash? Next time you are at the grocery store, pick up a couple of packages of beans and start saving for the future!