Valley Food Storage 175 Serving Long Term Food Kit

October 28, 2022

| By Mr.BOBB

Planning for emergencies means thinking about your priorities. Clothing, water, and food are going to be top of mind for any savvy prepper.

Clothing and water are immediate needs, but for long term events (think about the aftermath of a hurricane) having food available is going to be very important.

There are lots of options out there, and we go over several in our tutorial about survival food & fire making, but today we are going to discuss products from a company we have purchased several food kits from, Valley Food Storage and their 175 Serving Long Term Food Kit.

BTW If you buy anything with the links we provide on this page we might get a small percentage of the sale from the manufacturer. For more info click here.

Valley Food Storage

So who is Valley Food Storage? They are a group of folks in the Ohio area who started a freeze-dried food storage company, because like you, they believe that planning for an emergency survival event is not only prudent, but a necessary part of life.

Especially if you have a family to provide for!

We've been buying their products for a few years now, and it's great to see how well they are doing, and how quickly they have grown the company. When you provide a great service at a reasonable price, it's a no brainer that you will succeed.

They even have a podcast, a blog, and also sell emergency solar generators now.

Survival Food Considerations

The folks from Valley Food sent me their 175 serving bucket o' food for testing.

This was helpful as the food I had purchased from them in the past I was hesitant to open, since they were for my families long term food storage plans.

But now I have no excuse, time to dig into all of their offerings and live "out of the food pail" for a while.

Which, by the way is what you should do it if you are purchasing freeze dried food as your backup food preps.

The reason being, cooking with reconstituted food is a little different than what you might be used to.

Also it takes a little bit of tweaking to get the water to food ratios correct. (I think Valleys water amounts tend to be too high, more on that later.)

You'll also want to do more than just pour hot water into the bag and eat the result without embellishing on it. You can get away with that with some of the items, like the oatmeal, but some of them require a little garnish to make them more palatable IMO.

Also you need to have boiling water to make the food. If your power is out, do you have a backup plan for cooking?

If you have gas piped into the house, what will you do if it gets turned off? Things to think about.

Living Off Long Term Storage

For those of you who might be interested, I'm doing extensive testing of the food provided to me by the Valley Food Storage 175 Serving Long Term Food Kit and over the course of the next few weeks will eat and post reviews of each of the meals here.

I'm learning a lot by doing so, and picked up a few tricks along the way.

Mango Habanero Chili

I love chili, so naturally I started here.

The beans have a decent texture after being reconstituted and there was a nice flavor to it.

The little bits of mango in there were a nice touch.

Despite the name, it wasn't super spicy so I added a little hot sauce.

To punch up the meal I added some sausage, rice and squash. Also some frozen Mexican cheese.

This is my preferred approach with freeze dried food, use it as a base and add things to it that you have available.

It's not always the perfect solution, but it can help improve the flavor.

My preferred water to food ration was 1-1/2 cups of water to 1 cup food.

Mac & Cheese

This is one of my favorites. Tastes great right out of the package.

Make sure after you open it to reseal it and give it a few good shakes to spread the cheese around unless you are making it all at once.

Also try to smash the larger chunks of cheese back into powder before dumping it into the water.

I've found the right water to food ratio to be 1 cup food to 1-1/4 cup water. Boil the water, dump in the mac & cheese then reduce the heat. You could also cover and remove from heat at that point.

Let it sit for about 10 minutes to really let the macaroni get softer.

Stir often! The macaroni likes to get stuck to the bottom of the pot.