The first bag I ever vacuum sealed was a pound of leftover Thanksgiving turkey, and it went fine. Three days later I sealed a family pack of raw chicken thighs and did it wrong. I filled the bag too close to the top, the machine pulled the juice right into the seal, and the bar couldn't close through it. I ended up with a wrinkled, half-sealed bag and a counter that needed bleach. Seven weeks later I've sealed 61 bags, and I no longer need to watch the instructions video first.
I bought a basic FoodSaver on Black Friday for $89 (regular price $129), mostly because of August, when our old chest freezer died and we threw out about $210 of food. To be honest about that, a vacuum sealer wouldn't have saved a single thing that week. Warm is warm. What I wanted was better protection for the meat and cheese we buy in bulk, and fewer bags of freezer-burned chicken in the trash come May. Here's how it's going.
What I've sealed so far
- Matt's smoked Thanksgiving turkey, in 1-pound flat bags: 6 bags (four became December sandwiches)
- Shelled backyard pecans, in 8-ounce bags: 8 bags
- Christmas Eve tamales, six to a bag: 2 bags
- Ground beef and chicken from family packs, portioned one dinner per bag: 16 bags
- Two 2-pound blocks of Costco cheddar, cut in quarters: 8 bags
- Chili, chicken tortilla soup and turkey stock, frozen first and then sealed: 14 bags
- Carnitas leftovers and a double batch of red beans, in family portions: 7 bags
I buy rolls and cut my own lengths, which works out to about 30 cents a bag, so that's roughly $18 in bags.
What it does well
Meat, first and best. One-pound bags of ground beef pressed flat and sealed stack like file folders, and they thaw in a bowl of cold water (I follow the USDA's cold-water directions) in about half an hour. That has rescued two office-day dinners already. No ice crystals, no gray edges.
Cheese was the surprise. We go through a lot of shredded cheddar, and at Aldi an 8-ounce bag is $2.19, which is $4.38 a pound. A 2-pound block from Costco costs less per pound, but a big block used to go fuzzy in our fridge before we finished it. Sealed in quarters, the unopened pieces keep for weeks, and I grate one at a time.
Soup and chili, once I learned the trick: freeze it first in a loaf pan or quart container, pop out the brick, then seal it. The bricks stand up in the freezer like books on a shelf, and January's freezer clean-out has been much easier to see with everything flat and labeled.
What it doesn't do well
- Anything wet that isn't frozen. Liquid gets pulled toward the seal every time. Juicy meat and warm soup have to wait.
- Soft things. I sealed a bag of hamburger buns to see what would happen. What happened was flat buns. The basic model doesn't give me much control over how hard it pulls, so bread goes back to zip bags.
- Sharp edges. A turkey bone poked a pinhole in one bag, and I didn't notice until the bag went loose in the freezer a week later. Now I fold a paper towel over anything bony.
- Noise and space. It's about the size of a loaf of bread and lives in the pantry. When it runs, Rosie covers her ears and Biscuit leaves the room.
Has it earned back $89?
Not yet, and I want to be fair about the math. Here's what I can point to in seven weeks:
- Buying family packs on sale at Kroger and Costco and splitting them, instead of buying small packs week to week: about $16 saved, by my receipts
- Cheese by the block instead of the bag: about $3
- Food I'd normally have tossed by now for freezer burn or mold: maybe $10 to $15. I track spending to the penny, but I've never tracked waste that carefully, so this one is a guess.
Call it $30 to $34 saved, minus $18 in bags, for a net of somewhere around $14. At that pace it pays for itself sometime this fall. If I keep buying meat in bigger batches on sale, which is the plan once ground beef prices give me a reason to, it'll be sooner. The bags cost more than I figured going in, and that's the part I'd tell a friend about first.
Would I buy it again? At $89, yes. At $129 I'd have waited for a sale, which is exactly what I did. For now it lives on the second pantry shelf next to a roll of bags and a marker, and the marker gets almost as much use.
