From what I have heard, tesseracts have a hidden inventory slot of one, so ae can't be used in this fashion to fill up a remote inventory. The tesseract will get back stuffed with item 1, and never go on to item 2.
For my compostables, I feed everything from ae into several hoppers/chests and then pull out using item ducts from there. The item ducts then feed hoppers on top of the barrels, thereby giving multiple inventory slots to move more items through at once. This way, I only have to change my configuration at one spot to feed the initial chest, the the item ducts take over and distribute to the barrels.
P.S. item ducts will only pull out the number of items that will fit in the destination inventory. Barrels always have an available inventory of 1, unless they are full. So item ducts directly on top of barrels will only feed 1 item at a time no matter if it takes 5, 8, 10, or 32 items to fill it completely. Placing a hopper on top the barrel will allow the item duct to send up to 64 items at a time to the hopper, and the hopper will in turn feed the barrel at its maximum rate.