One of the hardest part of Food Storage is keeping everything organized and rotating the items that need to be rotated. My next project was beginning to get organized: Finding exactly how much of each ingredient I need to store. This is the first step to getting organized.
I took all of my recipes and wrote down each ingredient on a piece of lined paper. I then wrote down the amount needed for each recipe. For instance, a few of my lines looked like this:
Instant Rice-- 156,78 cups (I have 2 recipes that calls for Instant Rice)
Dry Onion Mix -- 26, 52 pkgs
Chicken Broth -- 104 cups
Chocolate -- 13 cups
After taking up a good 2+ pages doing that, I began to add them all together and find out the final amount needed. As an example, I took my Instant Rice and added 156 and 78 and got 234. So I need to get 234 cups of Instant Rice. I need 78 packages of Dry Onion Soup Mix and so forth. Wanna know how many cups of water I need for all of my recipes?? 3,571. Wow.
After I got all of those added up, I began figuring out how many containers, #10 cans, quart jars, pint jars, etc I needed of each item. Another example, if I were wanting to buy my Instant Rice in the large Minute Instant Rice boxes, I would figure out how many cups of cooked rice are in each box. Each box holds 37 half cup servings. So there are 18.5 cups of rice in each box. That means I would need 13 boxes of rice. Buying instant rice in bulk is also a GREAT option and is more cost effective. I will store rice in #10 cans, so after I buy my 13 boxes (or however else I choose to obtain 234 cups of rice) I will can them in #10 cans.
For the chicken broth, there are 2 cups of chicken broth per can, so I will need 52 cans of chicken broth. Since chicken broth from a can expires in about 2 years (or so) from the date of purchase, this is something you will need to keep rotated. (How to keep track of what needs rotating in your pantry will come later.)
For chocolate chips, these I will use my FoodSaver for. About 3 cups fit into a quart canning jar, so I will need 5 quart jars.
And I continued this for the 50 some odd ingredients.
If you get stuck with an ingredient because the container measures its contents in ounces instead of say, cups or teaspoons, look at the nutritional chart. It will give you how much a serving size is and how many servings are in the container. You might still need to do small conversions like how many tablespoons are in a cup if their nutritional chart measure servings in cups, for instance, but you should still be able to figure it out. I never knew how much math was involved in this venture until this part!
This is one of the paper I used. Included is all of my chicken scratch -- scribbles and all! (I'm sure yours will look much neater.)
After I got all of those calculations done, I was able to put it into my spreadsheet. This is the beginning of that:
Like I mentioned before, another sheet will follow soon to keep track consistently of how many you have, how many you use, and then how many more you need to buy as you are using things from your pantry. This sheet is just a beginning one. Many items, like pre-packaged items that are already packaged into $10 cans for long term storage (i.e. freeze dried fruit and veggies, powdered butter and eggs, flour, bullion, etc) have a very long shelf life, some upwards of 20 or 30 years. So those items you won't need to rotate for a long time if you don't need to. The items you will need to rotate are items like canned wet beans, oil, pancake mix, canned tomato items etc. Some of them have at least a year until expiration, but you will still need to rotate them before that time. That is what you will need an additional sheet to keep track of. I haven't made it yet, but I'm getting there!
If you would like a printable copy of this spreadsheet, please Contact Me at the tab on the top of the page and I will get one to you.
