Corn. I don’t know about where you live, but there is a lot of corn around here, any time of year. If you’re in the middle of the United States and not in a city, there’s probably a lot of corn around you. It’s a giant food source — but it takes some special handling for best use.
Here’s a podcast we did on the subject to listen along with as you read:
Why corn as a prepper food?
Cheap and abundant are two great reasons. We’ve got a couple of 50 lb bags of popcorn we bought for about $20 each. And that’s food grade. If we were being cheap instead, we’d have gone to the feed store and bought animal feed corn. It’s the same basic stuff, but if you get animal food you’d better clean it yourself. They’re less careful about removing small rocks and such from feed corn. What do you expect for $7 for 50 lb?
$7 for 50 lb; all it needs is a bit of cleaning before cooking.
It also stores pretty well. The foodie sites will tell you that whole corn stored reasonably dry, cool, and in an airtight container will keep for six months; half that if ground and twice that if frozen. Well, that what *they* say. It took me nearly three years to work my way through my first bag of popcorn, and it was still perfectly good.
Stored prepper-style (oxygen absorbers, air and lightproof, cool) I’d wager it would last longer than I will. Various prepper supply places give their products more than ten years listed shelf life.
Corn; because you’ll still want to eat real food.
Think about what’s really in most of those long term storage 30-day food buckets and such. One can only eat so many ‘creamy noodle soup’ dishes before you want to scream.
How about wrapping some of that every-present chili mix in a tortilla, adding some fresh sprouts and/or garden veggies, and topping the lot with cheese sauce? Doesn’t that sound a bit more like food?
Corn tortilla, wrapped around some chili and veggies or scrambled eggs, maybe some cheese sauce and sprouts atop…sounds like food!
What’s hard about corn?
You just boil it or roast it on the grill and eat it, Right? Well, that’s good for sweet corn. Sweet corn varieties lack and enzyme that converts sugars to starches. It makes the stuff much sweeter to eat, but much harder to store. I’m not talking sweet corn here. If you want that in your stores, you buy canned or freeze-dried.
What I’m talking about today, because it’s so abundant in middle America, is field corn. It’s pretty good fresh when it’s very young, with the kernels just filled out. Leave it another week, though, and it starts to get starchy and not sweet. Leave it there until it dries on the stalk and you have a product much better for storage.
This is the corn we in the Midwest harvest by the trainload and store by the silo-ful. It’s mostly used for animal feed and to make corn syrup.
The problem with field corn
The good news is, field corn dries itself and stores great. The bad news is, to get the most nutrition out of it, it needs special treatment. Ok, you can just boil the stuff up and eat it, or grind it into grits. There’s plenty of calories in that, and it’s easy.
On the other hand, you can’t make a dough out of it. No tortillas or tamales for you! It also lacks the vitamin niacin, so if you get most of your calories from it you’ll develop an unpleasant disease called pellagra. Moreover, the protein of untreated corn is not very ‘bioavailable’. That means it’s not in a form your gut will efficiently absorb.
Bonus: Sometimes stored grains are contaminated with aflatoxins. These are nasty toxins made by fungi that infected the grain. The corn treatment removes about 97% of the aflatoxins. (1)
“Fixing” field corn
To get the best nutrition and most versatility from your dried corn, it has to be converted to hominy, also called nixtamal. You make hominy by cooking the corn in a basic solution. The basic solution dissolves the hard outer shell of each kernel. It also causes chemical changes within. Niacin and proteins are converted to more bioavailable forms. The texture is altered as well, so you can form a dough that will hold together.
Pickling lime is available anywhere that sells canning supplies, and stores forever.
Where do you get a basic solution? There are three main choices. The most popular is to use calcium hydroxide. That goes under a variety of names: slaked lime, pickling lime, builder’s lime. You can buy slaked lime, finding it with the canning supplies, around here. I read you can also make it by burning then pulverizing mollusc shells (clam or oyster, for example).
The other two are close relatives, lye and wood ash. I say close relatives because if you take ashes from burning hardwoods and boil them in soft water (like rainwater) for an hour then let it sit, lye rises to the top. That stuff is very corrosive. Safety gear strongly recommended by this some-time chemist.
Turning corn into hominy
I read around, and found a variety of different versions. The basic plan is always the same: Boil the corn for awhile (minutes to hours) in water with lime, lye, or wood ash. Let it steep a longer time (hours to a day) in the hot water. Wash it really well.
Here’s a specific recipe (2):
- Shell the corn and blow off the chaff by tossing on a windy day (or use a box fan)
- Simmer 3.5 gal of water in a large pot. (The corn will triple its volume during cooking.)
- Sprinkle 1.5 cups pickling lime onto the water.
- Bring back to a simmer, then cover.
- Let steep 2 hr. The clean fluid on top is the lime water; keep it. Discard sediment.
- Add 6 lbs dried field corn to the lime water. Bring to a boil.
- Cover and simmer overnight. (She leaves it on a low-burning wood stove.)
- Wash the hominy carefully. (Apparently the fluid residue does not taste nice.)
The finished hominy/nixtamal is bigger, softer, more nutritious. *
What to do with the hominy corn
There are many choices here. Fresh hominy can be eaten as is, or sauteed in butter. You can grind it with a bit of water to make a corn dough. The corn dough can be rolled out and fried to make tortillas, or sliced thick and fried as polenta, or used as tamales. The hominy can also be dried for later use.
Pro tip
If we want to go all prepper fiction here and imagine we’ve got no supplies, not even a pot that can stand to be put over a fire … then what? Well, archeological evidence suggests this is how it was for the early native Americans before they developed pottery. They’d cook in wicker baskets by dropping hot rocks in the fluid.
Lo and behold, if you use *limestone* rocks, and you’re cooking corn in that wicker basket, you essentially nixtamalize the corn! Hominy results as the lime from the limestone dissolves in the water it heats, then acts on the corn.
It’s a recipe that might be custom made for Missouri: Field corn and limestone. Those, we have.
But watch out for moldy corn
Corn that’s left too long wet in the field, or is stored wet, can get moldy. No way I’d eat moldy corn, even though I know most species of those fungi don’t affect humans. Why? Four groups of molds do sometimes produce toxins that are damaging and potentially fatal to humans.
The best known of these four kinds of mycotoxins are the aflatoxins. I’ve read that nixtamalization destroys 97% of the aflatoxins. I don’t Know that’s true; I’ve just read it. Also, none of my sources mentioned what the basic treatment would do to the other three groups of toxins. Which leaves us with:
I would not eat moldy corn, with or without turning it into hominy. If the corn you buy is good and you keep it dry, it won’t mold.
References
1) Nixtamalization. Wikipedia. Accessed 4-12-19. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization
2) How to Make Hominy. YouTube. https://www.google.com/search?q=make+hominy&oq=make+hominy&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.2911j1j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#kpvalbx=1
* Thanks for the image to Glane23 [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]
Field corn get a mold on it that can be deadly to humans. If you see how it is stored you will understand this. Be careful! Do your research!
Good point, I meant to talk about this, I will add it to the article.
Wow, I was just looking up the calories in a pound of dry dent corn this afternoon! 1500 calories more or less depending on who you believe. I’ve eaten a lot of feed corn over the years during reenactments and such. CLEAN Wood ash (no treated woods etc.) works quite well but as Spice mentioned safety first, caustic, but then again I’ve made soap from wood ash lye and rendered fats so…
If you frame up a 1/4 inch hardware cloth screen along with a box fan you can process a 50 pound bad of feed corn easily in an hour or two. Putting into a mixing bucket and adding FOOD Grade DE mixing well will add calcium to your diet as well as keeping bugs from eating it first. Lasts for years as if kept cool and dry in a plastic sealable container.
Parched corn is easy to do, heating it up in a skillet until cracks. Makes tasty corn nuts style food. Common marching food for Civil War soldiers. Many other food options like hoe cakes, tortillas, corn bread etc. What we call feed corn plus beans is the healthy diet for most of the places in South America I have visited. Use horse grade corn PLEASE don’t use Deer Corn almost every bag of that I’ve opened was moldy. Horse people are CAREFUL what they feed multi-thousand dollar horses, trust me. Tractor Supply corn is excellent.
PLUS you can Plant them for more corn later. Try that with a frozen pizza.
Lots of corn we have? There is NO National Grain Reserve anymore. All stored grains are farmer or manufacturer stored. Given the reported flood damage to both silo stored grains and beans as well as still sloppy wet fields for planting more, I firmly expect the price for even Corn will go up, how far?
Time will tell. I know feed corn prices are going up as you read this note per my friend who manages a Tractor Supply.
That said if your even thinking about some corn storage for human or animal use DO IT SOON. Maintain control on rodent issues (look up stairway to heaven rat traps, very effective), store the corn in clean dry cool containers like food safe barrels both steel or plastic. New Garbage cans are quite good. Before you say “ewww” you should take a peek in the back room of your favorite grocery store. A new garbage can is cleaner.
You will need a 1/4 inch hardware screen framed up with 2×2 lumber plus a box fan to screen your feed corn for rocks and moldy bits. You will need one of those 20.00 plus cast iron hand grinders to crack it for chicken feed (set grinder plates loose) or with several grinds make corn meal or process that Hominy in to Masa flour for tortillas and such.
For those unable to have chickens, rabbits and such right now, making friends with small producers/hobbyist growing them has many benefits. You can learn a lot about them as they love to teach about chickens and rabbits. Also you are a known face to them IF feed supply gets sketchy AND you happen to have extra feed to trade with them.
Knowing how to candle an egg to see if its fertilized or simply bad is an easy to learn skill. Maybe trading some cracked corn for a few fertile eggs may be your blessing as aside from eggs and meat, Cooking Oil is the hardest item to store even frozen for long term. Unseasoned chicken fat is pretty useful to render as is of course as the old Irish Smallholder saying goes “The Gentleman that pays the rent” Mr. Pig.
The situation in Venezuela has been going bad for over what 7 YEARS? At least the last three years food has been a real issue for non-members of the socialist regime and their enforcers. How much food are you going to store Friend? Nice to have some hands on skills in gardening and small livestock before we really need it. A lawn is best described as a Mono-Culture Food Desert, very hard to garden in friends. Please think about it.