rjk and I are about to acquire a full-size freezer, and I’m probably going to fill it up with freezer meals. I thought a seal-a-meal would cut down on the amount of plastic containers I would need.
Do you have one? Do you use it a lot? Do you like it? What is your favorite food to bag and freeze? Or did you have one and ditch it?
Had one in the past, don’t have one now. With proper planning and wrapping, you can get away with double-freezer bagging paper-wrapped meats. The only thing I found the Seal-A-Meal really handy for was freezing soups and stews.
I have one and use it constantly. I’m not one to prepare and seal full meals, my use it pretty much limited to buying large quantities of meat and sealing smaller portions.
I don’t have personal experience with them, but I’ve always found them to be reliable. If you can’t get to it, let me know and I’ll find a way to get it to you. 
We bought one about 35 years ago from a TV ad. We used it and enjoyed it, but it got lost in our move to Indiana in 1978. It used special bags, and so in those pre-Internet days we never bothered to try to track another one down. We did like it, and if I still cooked I might think about getting another one.
I don’t have a Seal-A-Meal, but I do have a FoodSaver - mine seems identical to this one (but it’s a couple of years old, so things might have changed since). I like it a lot, and use it pretty frequently. Even though there’s just the two of us, I keep an eye on sales and buy family packs or whatever when they’re cheap.
I only use the bags, so far, and like best the ones that you cut to your own custom size - it seems like there’s less waste that way. I’ve only found one seal that seemed to fail, but it was frozen walleye - the walleye was frozen when I sealed it, and I’ve just now thought that it’s possible a scale pierced the bag while sealing, leading to a bag full of air later. Other than that, it’s worked a treat. I really like mine.
From the responses, I’m getting the impression that it’s more of an alternative to plastic bags than an alternative to tupperware - does that sound accurate?
Not really. Tupperware in a freezer doesn’t accomplish the main goal, which is keeping air away from the food. If you’re really careful, you can minimize the amount of air in a plastic bag, but there is almost always going to be some. A food sealer will ensure that there is no air in that bag (depending on the shape of the food).
There is a good reason food is sold in Cryovac packages. I frequently buy food in one vacuum packed package, cut it up into smaller chunks and seal those up in smaller vacuum packed package. The results are definitely worth it.
It would be awesome if you used it in conjunction with the Deal-A-Meal diet plan.
Have been using Food Saver for years. Buy family pack of pork steaks or chops and vacuum pack the extras for the freezer. Have pulled out of the freezer after several years with no freezer burn or other damage. For leftovers such as stews or chili, freeze in a shallow Glad container and vacuum pack after its frozen.
I have one (seal-a-meal brand). It’s really no comparison to a tupperware style container – it does about 1000 times the job at food preservation. On mother’s day I used rhubarb and raspberries that had been vacuum sealed the previous spring and summer respectively - they were in perfect condition without a hint of freezer burn.
I mainly use it to store excess produce from my farm share. Last year I sealed lots of onions, green beans, broccoli and peaches. Sometimes I seal cooked meals that are “wet” like stews, but only rarely.
If the one I have broke, I would definitely replace it.
It’s pretty simple to use but it is loud. I buy the bags in a roll and cut them to whatever size I need. You can reuse the bags until they get too narrow from being cut open.
We use ours frequently in conjunction with my sous vide supreme. We also buy stuff in large amounts and freeze it in portions, and freeze premade meal components in it, and leftovers for mrAru to take to work to nuke.
If you have the money, the chamber style vacuum sealers are a thousand times better. They cost a lot but there is no comparison.
I have a foodsaver and I love it. We shop at Costco about once a quarter and package the meat in meal sized bags. It takes an entire Sunday between shopping, cooking and packaging but it’s so nice to be able to just grab what we need each morning for dinner that night.
Most of the meat we freeze raw, but I also grill a bunch of chicken breasts and cut the meat into strips and freeze. We also freeze extra lean gr beef raw, but I buy lean or medium to cook and freeze. When you freeze cooked ground beef, not only do you leave most of the fat in the pan, when it freezes the fat seems to collect on the sides of the bag. Even when it’s defrosted most of the extra fat clings to the bag so you end up with much leaner meat than you started with. When I was doing this with extra lean it ended up fairly tasteless.
I’ve also done some marinades in the bag so while the meat is defrosting it’s also marinating.
In oppositions to silenus’s experience the only thing I don’t use it for is soups and stews. Those I put in tupperware.
How do you find it going from frozen to sousvide? I found that there was too much moisture inside the pouch after defrosting so I end up defrosting and repackaging before cooking. Is there a better way?
Just wanted to pop back in and say: My Seal-A-Meal crapped out so I bought a low-end Foodsaver, and the Foodsaver is a much, much nicer machine. It’s significantly quieter, the locking mechanism is a manual latch (so one less piece to break compared to the SAM) and you can seal without vacuum or with partial vacuum.
SAM pissed me off because the only thing wrong with it was the rubber gasket got bent/twisted over time and couldn’t hold vacuum, however the replacement part – though listed on their website – has been “out of stock” for six months.
Not really. The plastic used is thicker, and can be taken from the freezer and stuck in the micro or in boiling water without an issue. Vacuum sealing preserves food far longer than just the normal Zip-loc or whatever you’re using. I use mine for salmon, sausage, chicken, bacon, and anything else I use often. It’s also good for freezing things that normally stink up your freezer, like bell peppers. While I have a Kenmore machine, I only use the Food Saver rolls, as I think they are of superior quality.
While its great for meats, its even better for veggies. We buy the big Sams size bags of frozen corn and green beans. Before the machine, we’d get half a bag freezer burned. Now we package them in meal size portions with a couple of pats of butter. When we want some green beans, we pull them from the freezer, mic at 50% power for about 5-8 minutes, open the bag and serve. Almost like fresh.
I also make my own sausage and bacon. fatty meats don’t do well for a long time in the freezer, but when I vacuum seal them, they keep for a really long time.
It all depends really. I frequently seal stuff in marinade, or depend on the seasonings and the natural juices generated by cooking to become a sauce liquid for deglazing the pan we use to brown the outside [got to love the maillard reaction, burnt crunchy bits for the win!]
If you look at it like this - dredge a lovely lamb chop in ground mustard seed with some cracked brown mustard seeds, some thyme, some coarse sea salt and fresh cracked mignonette pepper and freeze. In the time it takes to freeze, and then during the 5 or more hours it spends in the sous vide at 130F the juices create a light mustard and herb liquid. You pop open the bag gently, reserving the liquid in a small cup, toss the chops into a hot saute pan with a dab of olive oil and give them a bare minute on a side. Pop them onto a plate and put the mustard liquid into the pan to deglaze, and ad a dab of butter, then a splash of sherry and you now have a very nice sauce for the lamb chops.
If for some reason I don’t want a sauce, then just take the meat out of the pouch, pat it dry with paper toweling and saute, grill or broil to brown the exterior - or if it is going to be wrapped in puff pastry for a beef wellington, wrap the outside in a nice duxelles of mushrooms after patting dry.