"Loud," Rosie said, with both hands over her ears, the first time I ran the vacuum sealer. She's two, and she isn't wrong. For about fifteen seconds it sounds like a small shop vac, then it clicks, the light goes off, and a pound of smoked turkey is sealed tight in a bag with no air left in it at all. She has since decided she likes pushing the button.
I bought it on Black Friday morning for $89, down from its regular $129. It's a basic FoodSaver, the kind with a couple of buttons and not much else. I'd been circling one for years. What finally pushed me was August.
The freezer, and what I learned from it
On August 2, during a stretch when our garage hit 108 degrees, our old chest freezer quietly died. We didn't find out until August 4. We saved what was still frozen solid by moving it to the kitchen freezer and the Nguyens' freezer across the street, and we threw away about $210 worth of food. I wrote about all of that back in August, and about the garage-ready freezer that replaced it.
To be clear, a vacuum sealer would not have saved one ounce of that food. A dead freezer is a dead freezer. But emptying it out made me look hard at what we'd been storing and how. A lot of what I threw away had been in bad shape before the freezer ever quit: ground beef still in thin store wrap with frost inside, chicken thighs in zip bags I'd reused one time too many, a chunk of smoked brisket that was more freezer burn than brisket. That's a slower kind of loss, and it had been happening for years without my counting it.
What we freeze, and why it matters here
We freeze more food than most families I know. It's a big part of how I keep five people near $250 a week. A typical month in our chest freezer includes ground beef bought on sale, family packs of chicken thighs, smoked meat from Matt's Saturday cooks, the Hatch chiles we roasted in August, our backyard pecans, and every soup and casserole I double. When something gets freezer burn and goes in the trash, that's money. When it gets freezer burn and we eat it anyway, that's a worse dinner. A good seal fixes most of that.
Why the basic one
I looked at three kinds before Black Friday.
- Handheld rechargeable sealers, around $30 to $40. Small and cheap, but they need their own zipper bags with a valve, and the seal didn't sound as dependable for months in a freezer.
- Bigger countertop FoodSavers, regularly $129 to $199 and up, with automatic bag detection, a built-in roll holder and cutter, and a handheld attachment. Nice, but I didn't want to pay extra for a cutter when I own scissors.
- Chamber sealers, $400 and up. They're what a lot of restaurants use, and they handle liquids beautifully. Far more machine than our kitchen needs, and too big for our counter.
The basic model vacuums, seals, and has a gentler setting for soft food. That's everything I wanted. At $89 it was the cheapest version of the thing I'd actually use.
The machine is a one-time purchase. The bags aren't. I buy rolls and cut bags to size, which works out to about 30 cents a bag for the sizes I use most. If I seal twenty bags a month, that's $6 a month, or $72 a year, and that's real money in my spreadsheet. So I'm not sealing everything. Soups and chili still go in quart zip bags frozen flat, because we eat them within a month or two. The sealer is for things that sit longer: meat bought in bulk, cheese, pecans, big batches I won't touch until spring. Bags that held dry things like pecans get cut below the seal and used again.
The first five days
So far I've sealed six one-pound packs of leftover Thanksgiving turkey, two big blocks of Costco cheddar cut into quarters, four pounds of shelled pecans, and three family packs of chicken thighs I bought Monday.
I've also made the classic mistake. I tried to seal a bag of turkey with a little broth in it so it wouldn't dry out. The vacuum pulled the broth right up into the sealing strip, the seal didn't take, and I got to wipe turkey broth out of the drip tray. Anything wet now freezes first, in a container or on a sheet pan, and gets sealed once it's solid. My second mistake was laying the bag on the strip with a wrinkle in it, which leaves a tiny channel for air. Flat and dry, every time.
It lives on a pantry shelf, not the counter, and comes out on Sundays. I'll check back after the holidays, around the seven-week mark, with an honest answer on whether it has earned back its $89.
