So I found this Jbird!
How to store brown rice for 7 to 10 years (or more).
The conventional wisdom is that you can't store brown rice. It has only a 6-month shelf life and cannot be stored because rice bran oil goes rancid by other processes than simple oxidation. Six-month shelf life in the pantry? True. Cannot be stored? False. It can be, just not by simply taking 5 (or 25) pounds of brown rice and sealing it up in mylar with an oxygen absorber.
The oil in rice's outer bran
is highly susceptible to rancidity via processes other than oxidation, so just putting it in mylar with an oxygen absorber won't do it. That will stop the oxidative rancidity, but the enzymatic rancidity will go right on its merry little way. OTOH, that "other process" is due to lipase and related enzymes, and lipase and related enzymes can be inactivated with heat.
The shelf life of raw brown rice is 6 months. The shelf life of precooked and dehydrated instant brown rice, however, is at least 2 years from date of manufacture. (The Best By date is generally more like 21 to 18 months from the time you buy it, but it's 2 years from the manufacturing date.) Why? Because cooking inactivates the lipase. Enzymatic oxidation cannot proceed in the absence of enzymes, and heat kills enzymes.
There are 3 brown rices currently sold by food storage companies--Augason's regular brown rice in a bucket and Thrive's and AlpineAire's instant/minute brown rices in #10 cans. They all claim a 7-year shelf life or better (AlpineAire says 10 for its Gourmet Reserve instant brown rice). However, in my book, Augason lies. I am one of those who is fairly sensitive to rancidity. Brown rice that has been around for a few months begins to smell to me faintly like my grandmother's attic --an unpleasantly musty odor--that then gets stronger by the month until a mouse has died in the attic. Open a bucket of Augason after just 2 years, and I'm back in that attic. Open a can of Thrive or AlpineAire after 4 years, on the other hand, and no such thing. You're right, my nose isn't a precision analytic instrument--although I do detect rancidity in food before many other people I know will notice it. But in this case, I can prove that my nose is simply confirming established fact where brown rice and rice bran oil is concerned.
The kinetics of lipase activity and hydrolytic rancidity of raw, parboiled, and extruded rice bran during storage
Please note, though, that you need time at boiling temperature to completely deactivate all the enzymes. (The only-160-degree parboiling temp did just a partial job on their tested bran.) If you want to make your own precooked and dehydrated brown rice (which is a heck of a lot cheaper than buying Minute Rice), either cook it like pasta in a large pot of water at a rolling boil until almost done and then drain it, or pressure cook it. (I prefer the big pot of boiling water method because that simultaneously greatly reduces the arsenic content, of which brown rice has more than white along with its more of other minerals.) In either case, immediately after it finishes cooking, run it through your dehydrator set to max to get it bone dry before packaging. You should also try to buy brown rice from this year's harvest shortly after it occurs if you intend to store it. You now have brown rice that will store according to the usual rules of food put in mylar with an oxygen absorber versus food in a jar or canister in the pantry--4 to 5 times more shelf life in mylar, or 8 to 10 years instead of 2--very much in line with the 7 years Thrive gives for their instant brown rice and the 10 years Alpine Aire gives for theirs under best storage conditions. (Without cooking the rice, the best you're going to possibly do is to increase the 4- to 6-month shelf life by 2 to 3 times, the multiple for a food with high unsaturated oil content stored with oxygen absorbers, which will get you 12 to 18 months max if you snagged the rice as soon as it came out of the paddy--sorry, Augason, but them's the facts. WalMart's Augason brown rice is cheap brown rice in a bucket, but the first thing you should do with it is open the bucket, cook and then dehydrate the rice, and mylar it with O2 absorbers before putting it back.)
For the icing on the cake, there are a few other things you can do to get brown rice that stores even longer than 7 to 10 years.
First, you can go for color. Buy the darkest brown rice you can find or, much better, buy red or purple rice. More phytonutrients for you, better storage life for the rice.
Publication : USDA ARS
Publication : USDA ARS
Second, you can soak it in a solution of warm green or white tea extract (white is actually best, but green will do well enough) for at least 8 hours, or preferably long enough for it to start to germinate and become GABA rice (18 to 22 hours in warm water, a couple of days in cooler water), before cooking it. Much more nutrition for you, a flavor and texture even white-rice people like, plus you've now infused your rice with chlorogenic and caffeic acids as well as all the other antioxidants in green/white tea.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17995599
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3249787/
I will note there are a couple of publications out there with findings that declorophyllized green tea works better as an antioxidant in oils. And green tea without much chlorophyll--is pretty much what white tea is. (The difference between high and low chlorophyll content is probably that magnesium is to chlorophyll what iron is to hemoglobin, and metals tend to catalyze reactions.)
Finally, you can dip your cooked rice in or spray it with an ascorbyl palmitate (oil-soluble vitamin C) and mixed tocopherols (vitamin E) antioxidant solution before drying and storing.
http://www.bulksupplements.com/ascorbyl-palmitate-viamin-c-ester.html
https://purebulk.com/vitamin-e-powder-d-alpha-tocopheryl-acetate-700-iu/
(note, gamma and delta tocopherols are more effective antioxidants than alpha tocopherol)
https://bulknaturaloils.com/mixed-tocopherols-95.html
http://www.organic-creations.com/preservatives/784-vitamin-e-t-50-mixed-tocopherols
http://www.theherbarie.com/Covi-ox-T-50-Vitamin-E.html
(For small quantities, you can also find mixed-tocopherol oil capsules sold wherever you can buy vitamins and supplements)
https://www.vitacost.com/now-sunflower-lecithin-powder
(You will need lecithin to emulsify any of the mixed tocopherol oils into a water-based spray/dip)
You might also try this ascorbyl palmitate-mixed tocopherol-rosemary extract combo, available here in retail quantities (it is food grade):
http://www.theherbarie.com/Antioxidant-Synergy-Blend-ASB.html
Note that brown rice is only 3% oil by weight, so for 25 pounds of rice, you need only enough antioxidant to treat 340 mg of oil, which equals 360 mL or 12 ounces for rice bran oil. For the 27 mg of oil in 2 pounds, you need only apply enough antioxidant for 28.65 mL or 1 ounce of oil.
Some research on use of natural antioxidants for oils
http://lib3.dss.go.th/fulltext/Journal/J.AOCS/J.AOCS/1998/no.7/jul1998,vol75,no7,p813-822.pdf
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21612227
http://www.mdpi.com/2076-3921/3/1/176/htm
Germinate a nice dark brown rice in white tea extract before boiling it up, give it an antioxidant boost with a little added vitamin C & E before dehydrating it, and your rice should be good for 10 to 12 years mylared with an oxygen absorber and kept in ideal cool storage conditions, or for 5 to 7 years if it can get up around 80 in your storage space. If you soak and cook 2 pounds a day and keep your dehydrator going, you can put up 25 pounds of GABA brown rice in less than 2 weeks, 50 in less than a month, with only a few minutes a day of actual time in the kitchen. If you'll settle for 4 to 8 years of shelf life (depending on storage temp), you can go as fast as the size of your pressure cooker and dehydrator space allows. (Do not cook up more at once than you can fit in your dehydrator, though--cooked rice left sitting in the refrigerator can grow bad things in just a day.)
Yah, brown rice will store only 7 to 10 years after you put some labor into it, about 12 at the outside, and parboiled white rice will store 20 to 25 years in ideal conditions and has most of the nutrition of brown (other than the bran fiber and a big dose of EFA and magnesium and some other minerals, of course...plus being a little lacking to me in flavor and texture). I just like brown (and red and purple) rice much better than parboiled white rice. And my beans aren't good for more than 7 to 10 years, either, so brown rice that stores 7 to 10 years is all I really need. And I have it. Plus the way I prep it to get a long storage life also gives me low-arsenic rice. :thumb:
Source for white tea extract:
https://www.naturesflavors.com/inst...r-vegan.html?search_query=white+tea&results=8
(about 1 t/quart will make a tea to soak and cook your GABA rice in--put 1-1/2 t (30 g/1 oz) in each 6 cups of water per 2 pounds of rice to soak, then drain the rice, saving the soak water, and add another 4 to 5 quarts of water to the soaking water and bring to a boil to cook the rice pasta style.)
Making GABA brown rice and cooking like pasta to reduce arsenic:
http://www.survivalistboards.com/showthread.php?p=13923106&highlight=gaba#post13923106
(For dehydrating for storage, I like to undercook a little, just to al dente. It's easy to test if you're boiling in an open pot. For pressure cooking, you'll have to do some experimenting to find the right timing for each variety.)
Germinating brown rice
https://humanelivingnet.net/2013/02/06/germinating-brown-rice/
(NB: If your brown rice doesn't germinate at all after 2 days in around 90ºF water/tea, it's most likely because it's old rice. Don't use non-germinating brown rice as storage rice; whether your nose can tell or not, the oil in it is already going rancid.)
Green-tea-germinated brown rice
http://blog.mellowmonk.com/2007/01/green-tea-boosts-gaba-content-of.html
(Sorry, never copied the original article, which I can now find only in Japanese, but this gives the gist of it.)
I realize making your own Minute Rice will strike some as way too much like work. OTOH, you're going to spend time cooking your rice at some point, probably in smaller batches which will add up to even more time spent cooking up your 25- or 50-pound bucket than doing it in big batches, and what better to have in your emergency stores than rice to which you only have to add boiling water and wait 10 minutes? Pair it with precooked, dehydrated beans and you're pretty much set for all kinds of good meals in 15 minutes or less made by just boiling water. And those precooked dehydrated beans will never get hard to cook, that precooked dehydrated rice
can be brown, and you can have an 8- to 10-year rotation on your convenience-food storage.
BTW, heat killing the enzymes that cause enzymatic rancidity is why oatmeal keeps so well even though raw oat groats have as short a shelf life as brown rice. On the way to becoming oatmeal, the oats are first kilned and then additionally steamed to allow them to be rolled--bye-bye enzymes, hello 20-year storage life at 60 degrees (or 10 years at 70 degrees) with O2 absorbers. For most grains, the whole or whole hulled grain stores best, steel-cut next best, and rolled or ground meal least well. It's the application of considerable heat with the destruction of the enzymes that cause enzymatic oxidation that changes the equation for oatmeal. Oats just taste better toasted and roasted, so that's how they're processed. As a side effect, oatmeal becomes the one common processed whole-grain cereal that has a very long storage life.
ETA: Y'all can blame this post on Zeke, who nagged at me a while back to get together some documentation and make a thread about how I had been storing brown rice successfully for years because I didn't know it supposedly couldn't be done.
The conventional wisdom is that you can't store brown rice. It has only a 6-month shelf life and cannot be stored because rice bran oil goes rancid by other processes than simple oxidation. Six-month shelf life in the pantry? True. Cannot be stored? False. It can be, just not by simply taking 5...
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