Does home vacuum food storage work?

I’ve seen 2 methods for vacuum storing food at home. One uses special plastic containers and a hand operated pump. The other uses a machine that vacuums and seals special plastic sheet/bags.

I don’t think you can reduce pressure by more than half by hand pumping, so I’m wondering if the containers work? How about the machine method, can it reach pressures used in commercial vacuum packing?

I’ve got a crappy foodsaver, pretty much as old as when they first came out. It has a crappy gasket, but it really does seal pretty damn well. I’d compare it to a commercially packaged item.

I love my foodsaver. I buy family pack sized cuts of meat, and seal them into individual servings. They keep in the freezer for months, if not years, without freezer burn. Occasionally, one will develop a leak from being jostled around in the freezer when I am moving things, but that is rare.

I have a Foodsaver and it works great. I use the bags for meat and other firm foods, and canisters for soft foods, brown sugar, and coffee. It is not quite as good as commercial because of the way the bags seal, but the vacuum is just as good. (The bags are heat-sealed along a narrow line, and occasionally the seal leaks. If you look at a commercial vacuum-packed meat the seal is all the way around and rock-solid.)

I have a FoodSaver (home-use vacuum sealer) and a commercial vacuum sealer. I assume the hand pump one you mean is this. I have the predecessor of that one, which is a hand-held sealer with batteries. Yeah, I like to seal things :slight_smile:

The pros/cons:

Hand-held: It’s cheap. It also takes special ziploc bags, which are more expensive than normal ziplocs (list price for 12 quart-size bags is $4.29, working out to about 36 cents each). The mechanism is fiddly; you can’t fill the bags all the way up, because the plastic dimple you attach the pump to is in the upper right corner, and to get a good seal you need that to be on a flat surface. It can be kind of tricky to get it to seal, but if you do get it sealed, it works.

The other big advantage of this system is it’s the only one that you can open the bag and then re-seal it without much hassle.

FoodSaver: as others have said, this works pretty well. The bags can be pricy (list price $11.99 for 20 quart-size bags, or about 60 cents each). You can bring that down a little by buying rolls of bag-plastic and sealing your own, but it still ain’t cheap. I’ve had trouble getting good seals with these at times. You can’t easily seal liquids in them (the vacuum pulls it out).

A big advantage of this system is that you’re only limited by the size of the bag. If you buy the rolls of plastic, you can make pretty long bags.

Commercial (“Chamber”) sealer: I only have experience with one of the smaller versions of these. Two big drawbacks: they’re expensive (large ones can be thousands of dollars) and they’re big & heavy. You don’t buy one of these and stuff 'em in a cupboard and only pull them out when you need them. The one I linked weighs 50 pounds; it lives on the counter.

Advantages: The bags are cheap - 500 6x12" bags, which hold slightly less than a quart, retail for 49.95. That’s 9 cents each, and if you buy from a discounter or in larger quantities you can get that down to 2 or 3 cents a bag. The machine and sealing process itself is much more hands-off than the other two methods, and more reliable. I get less leakage with this machine than the other two by far.

You can also seal liquids in it, no problem. The vacuum is powerful enough that you can use it to force marinades into food - I’ve infused fruit with flavorings and liquors, for example (watermelon infused with Tequila and Chile powder makes a great appetizer). It’s also a TON of fun to watch as it pumps all the air out of the chamber before sealing.

Disadvantages: As I mentioned above, the price, and the size/weight. This is not for the faint of heart. The size of what you seal is limited by the size of the chamber.

I will say this: Now that I have the chamber sealer, and I have room for it to sit on my counter, I use it ALL THE TIME. It’s really convenient, and I never feel bad about throwing stuff in a vacuum bag because the bags are so cheap. I wasn’t sure when I bought it if I’d use it enough to make it worth the money, but I’ve had it for a year now, and it’s one of my favorite kitchen gadgets.

We fought this for years as well. Then somebody told us “put the liquid stuff in a container, freeze it, dump it out when solid, and then seal it in the bag” :smack:

Another vote for the food saver being a pretty damn handy thing for a certain type of lifestyle/living. And I say that as somebody who really isnt a kitchen gadget type of person. And get yourself a good waterproof sharpy marker and label and date those bags! Its amazing how after not very long you don’t remember whats what, it all starts looking the same, and you can’t remember when you put it in there

I found that you pretty much have to use the Foodsaver brand bags/rolls with it as it never seemed to work with the generic/off brand ones.

Yeah, that works for some things, but not for others. Like, if you want to seal together some meat & sauce for sous-vide, you don’t want to wait for the sauce to freeze. And some liquids don’t freeze well. Or if you wanted to seal, say, homemade stock for later use, it’s a lot more work to freeze it in individual containers then transfer to bags and seal.

I have a vacuum/heatsealer although I do not know the brand name. I like it. My gf cracks up because anytime she opens something, I’m right behind her resealing the bag.

Oh, that’s another plus for the FoodSaver types of sealers - you can re-seal things like potato chip bags with them.

Not sure why, but that doesn’t work with the chamber sealer.

nm

This is true. I once bought Black & Decker vacuum bags, and they wouldn’t seal worth a damn on my Foodsaver.

Actually, the hand pump I was talking about used hard containers, something like: VACUVIN - Vacuum food saver boxes I don’t think hand pumping is enough to create a useful vacuum.

Has anyone compared vacuum packing with good quality plastic bags? Does vacuum packing protect against things other than freezer burn?

Love my foodsaver, get bags at Costco.
I have a set of hard containers as well for marinades and infusions.
to give you some idea of how useful these can be I made pasta a couple months ago, I made the sauce in a 6 quart crock pot and ended up with 22 or so pasta dinners. I can grab one at any time and drop em in the microwave.

for the liquid problem here is my solution

I think thats the size. they are just shorter than the bags are wide and if you dont fill them all the way the frozen food fits perfectly. soups, sauces, stocks, pasta, roasted veggies, basically anything that will freeze together works well.

Pantry moths. They’re the primary reason I use my vacuum sealer.

Wouldn’t it be easier to just get rid of the pantry moths?

So, basically, these things are good for people who make food in big batches and want to be able to freeze individual portions for later re-heating? (Other than the watermellon-tequila thing, which is almost enough to make me sacrifice $650 and 2’ of counter space.)

Vacuum packing reduces the amount of air in the container and so dramatically reduces the rate of spoilage due to air-breathing bacteria. It may also slow down any other types of chemical decomposition that occur as a result of exposure to air but I’m not knowledgeable about what that might be. I just know that it keeps my coffee beans, brown sugar, and tomatoes that have a slice cut off fresher much longer.

Mine has two main uses:

  • freezing, as you mention. I have a full-size freezer in the garage, and I make a lot of stuff like sausages. Living in a humid climate, without a vacuum sealer, it’s very difficult to seal things in a manner that lets them sit in the freezer for several months without freezer burn.

  • sous-vide cooking.

What else is there?

Done. But keeping them from recurring is simpler if they do not have access to pantry products.:wink: