Good morning all, hope everyone is recovering well from the candy overload from yesterday!
I live in a small ex-military community, and as a result, we have a large Korean population. There are 3 korean markets, and two korean restaurants in my town. I have shopped at the markets a couple times, and I was just eating a version of their ramen, and I thought to myself "this would be a GREAT place to stock up on on storage food!" There are a lot of dried foods, spices, crackers, cookies, all kinds of stuff, that is intended for long term storage. Some of my purchases have been culinary adventures, as I can neither speak, or, more importantly, read korean. One of the stores even sells basic goods like blankets, pillows, towels, and daypacks.
I got to wondering if other ETS members have looked into these little gems within their community for long term foods? The prices are cheap, the choices are wide, the flavor is outstanding, and I get to try new & interesting foods all the time. Has anyone else out there visited ethnic markets for their shopping needs, and had similar positive experiences?

Sure, it's a great way to get real, natural food at a decent price. Personally I'm a major fan of Middle Eastern cuisine but these days we are blessed with such abundance and diversity you can get just about any kind of food imported from the remotest corners of the Earth.

Also, I very much agree with your observations re: long term storage foods. There are usually plenty of choices at various ethnic markets and they tend to be much better (tastier as well as healthier) than canned or dehydrated rations.

Yup--Minneapolis has quite a few like that from Russian,good for dry meats,to Asian,good for dry noodle sort of things..
one tip---Mango Tang--

I've shopped ethnic stores -- always interesting and with good result -- but never had an epipheny related to preparedness.

There is much to be said for variety in the pantry, under any circumstance.

Coffee/tea biscuits like "Ulker" brand are out of this world. For some reason you can only find them in ethnic stores.

Not just long storage, but long storage with no refrigeration.
The only real caution is that some of the stuff needs special techniques to cook.

I usually find there are a lot of things that are very cheap and store forever but take a day or more to prepare. I don't mean you work at it for a day, just that you start to prepare it a day ahead of time.
It might be as simple as a quick soaking to rinse excess salt, a day of soaking to get rid of more salt and rehydrate the product or it might be a day of slow simmer on the back of a stove to tenderize it enough to eat.
Kind of like cooking dried beans.
Of course this is fine if you are not going anywhere in a hurry anyhow.

Sca, that is true-a lot of their dried veggies you need to soak. I had primarily looked at their dried soups & things though-better tasting & more nutritious ramen, as it were. And their cracker selections, as well as their sweets-they have some amazing confectionaries at the local store!
I just think its a nice mix of longer term food staples-beats mac & cheese, which I can take or leave.

Although not everyone has a store in their area, any place that serves the Amish also will have a lot of items that (duh :-) do not require refrigeration.

I always end up spending a lot of money on storable foods when I'm in there.

There is a German company that is producing authentic long shelf life American style ethnic food but the product is very expensive.

A review is available here;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30c6BiexSiw&feature=related

I am going to live up to my signature for a moment.

I have a hard time getting the tone right in print. I hope the comment about long prep times was not taken wrong. In an awful lot of situations you have a lot of time available and not a lot of things to do.
Sometimes a "slowfood" meal offers a relief from boredom and worry because it at least gives you something to do while you wait out the emergency.

One of the other things I lament with our modern and efficient homes is the loss of our root cellars and other normal storage places.
We don't usually have the places our grandparents would have stored enough veggies to get through the winter or the dry lofts they would have stored dried foods in.
Most of us have replaced those storage options with a small refrigerator and a quick trip to the store to restock it every few days.
Jaywalker's comment about the Amish reminds me about how the older farmers used to spend a lot of time every year canning and preserving. They usually made one trip to town a month and expected to have enough supplies in their kitchen pantry to last at least 2 months in case they couldn't get to town.
We don't live like that any more, and while I do value refrigerators and freezers they do have a cost in addition to the hydro to run them.
We no longer use the alternate food storage methods.
I can remember my parents filling crocks with cabbage to ferment into sauerkraut. Bags of onions hanging in the cellar along with bushels of apples and sacks of potatoes.
We don't place rows of pickles in jars on shelves behind the basement stairs or have bins full of winter squash available anymore.
In the early part of the last century even houses in town usually had these storage places available. From about the middle of the last century these storage options disappeared.
Now you don't see those storage places even in rural homes.

That is about the end of my wandering thoughts about it.
I only add that there are a lot of storage methods we no longer even think about. They include fermented foods too.
Things like fermented pickles, long storing root crops, sugar or salt curing.

Scafool, you bring up several valid points.

On this property, the garage is old (1902), and the owners installed a 'fruit room' between the back wall of the garage and the adjoining little garden tool room. Both the fruit and garden tool rooms are only 4' wide, and run the width of the garage. The fruit room is heavily insulated and doesn't freeze. There are shelves on both long walls.

For someone with a bit of property, they could build one of Nader Khalili's sandbag shelters: Mark a circle about 10' in diameter on level ground, dig within the circle, fill regular sandbags with the soil removed from the circle. Lay the sandbags just outside the circle, ends butted together, leaving an opening for a door. Lay two rows of barbed wire on top of each sandbag layer. Gradually move the sandbag layers inward to form a dome. Add a wood frame and a door. Almost half will be underground where the soil stays cool. Cover the dome with either a large sheet of heavy plastic that extends beyond the dome, or coat with an inch or so of concrete. Cover all with a thick layer of soil and plant with something that has a dense root system, like perennial clover.

This shelter could also be used as an emergency fire shelter, but you would have to build a protective dogleg barrier of rock/concrete or brick/mortar in front of the door to protect it from heat.

But it should make a great root cellar.

Sue

Interesting, Sue. I've always thought that his Super Adobe shelters had a lot of merit, although they're about as aesthetically pleasing as a small bee hive!

I know it's going to vary by climate and location, but how deep do you think you'd have to dig to make an effective root cellar using this method? I guess I'm wondering if maybe it doesn't have to be as deep as what I think a traditional root cellar has to be. Or maybe my idea of a root cellar being something that you physically take stairs down into, like a basement, is also not an accurate idea either?

Arney, that would likely depend on where you live. Frost lines, at least here in New England, RARELY extend beyond the first 6" of earth. Once you get through that, the ground is no longer frozen. But, our root cellars here are actual cellars; in MA, a house is required to have a basement as part of the building code, with a couple exceptions (apt buildings & modular homes being two of them). Most older homes have basements with packed dirt floors-houses built, say, before the 50's. Granted, most folks these days likely pave it over with cement, to finish it, but I recall the house I grew up in having packed earth floors, and my feet ALWAYS being dirty-getting yelled at for tracking dirt from the cellar through the rest of the house was a daily occurence!