My Favorite Appliance Sucks. Literally.

I am a product whore, and I will be the first to admit it. When I find something I love, I never stop talking about it until all of my friends and family own the product as well. Raise your hand if you use Ojon hair products because of me, if you now own a KitchenAid slow cooker, or if you’ve tried any of the makeup products that I swear by. Exactly.

But there’s an extra-special group out there, and you know who you are. You are the people that I converted to the Cult of the FoodSaver. On all of the various message boards, discussion groups, chat rooms, and that pesky real life that I participate in, I have always been the number one advocate of the FoodSaver. When pressed for a reason why I love it so much, I name off a few things and always forget some. This post serves two purposes for me: 1.) Convert more of you to the cult and 2.) Give me something to link to in lieu of ever having to type again.

First, I’m going to show you a simple demonstration of my most common use of the FoodSaver. For this demonstration, I’m using my FoodSaver, a model V2840 that I have owned for approximately two years.

Despite the frequency of use and its handy flip-up design, I do not store my FoodSaver on the counter. I store it in this totally useless cabinet which must have been designed for the FoodSaver about 40 years before it existed.

Our demonstration will take place on my kitchen counter, with my authentic z-brick backdrop and a decorative bowl of lemons, limes, and clementines, which I swear I did not create for this purpose alone – but doesn’t it look good with the z-brick?

(Tangential trivia: Wrecks will not eat oranges, but he will eat clementines. Weird wild stuff.)

I’m going to use meat for this demonstration. Vegetarians, avert your eyes. I live with a caveman who eats massive quantities of animal flesh, and I would go broke if I had to buy meat in small quantities or risk freezer burn with a less dependable food storage method. Here’s the haul from today’s trip to my friendly neighborhood Woodman’s. We are looking at a family pack of boneless skinless chicken thighs, a family pack of boneless skinless chicken breasts, a pork butt roast, and approximately six pounds of ground beef.

I divide the ground beef into manageable portions and freeze them individually. This 6 pound package is already divided into four approximately 1.5 lb hunks, so that’s what I’m going to vac, seal and freeze. Most recipes call for beef one or two pounds at a time, and I always add extra because of the aforementioned caveman.

I am first going to determine the size of bag that I need. FoodSaver sells quart and gallon sized bags that are pre-cut and sealed at one end, but I find them to be wasteful. I buy the bag material by the roll and make custom bags. There is a narrow roll and a wider roll to provide for maximum customization and the least waste. I’m using the narrow roll here. FoodSaver bags can be refrigerated, frozen, microwaved, simmered, and washed and reused (except when used for meat).

So the first step is to seal one end of the roll. Then I roll out the bag material and use the built-in blade to cut it. This is where a FoodSaver model that features an included bag storage and blade comes in especially handy.

I now have my bag. I’m going to stuff it with beef. I will pause while you giggle.

I’m going to pack the beef into the bottom of the bag, creating a lumpy mess with lots of excess plastic at the top. You’ll understand soon, my child. Now I’m going to put the open end of the bag into the channel,

close and lock the lid,

and choose my settings. This is a moist food and the normal speed setting will be fine. There’s a fast setting. I can’t remember using it, but I bet the manual or the DVD is more knowledgeable than me. But you don’t get that stuff until you spend the money, so you’re stuck with my knowledge.

I hit the button that says Vacuum & Seal and SHAZAM! Look at that.

I then take the lumpy cumbersome wad of meat and squish it around inside the package until I have a thinner flatter more uniform package. I do this for freezer space conservation reasons. Once frozen, this hunk of meat will stack well, stand up on its own, fit into the door compartment, and just generally behave like a well-respected and polite member of my frozen animal flesh community.

Now some meats are juicier than this ground beef and take one extra step, and that step is a quick pre-freeze. Chicken breasts and thighs can either sit in a strainer for half an hour, get packaged with a paper towel in the top of the bag between the seal and the chicken, or else you can pre-freeze. If you try to seal exceptionally juicy food, the juice gets sucked out and interferes with the sealing process of the bag. I prefer the pre-freeze, because I like to think that I’m retaining juices in the meat. I could be making this all up though, who knows. I sleep better at night knowing my juice is still in the package. So slap the meat (or fresh fruit) on a tray and put it in the freezer for a bit. It doesn’t need to freeze solidly, just a bit. Then you can vac and seal as usual.

One of the biggest uses of the FoodSaver here in beautiful downtown Cherry Valley, IL is the preservation of the sour cherries that grow on the cherry trees in our front yard. It took me quite awhile to decide how to deal with the cherries once I realized they are coming in by the gallon. I am very happy with the method I chose. I picked the cherries, washed them, pitted them, froze them on a plate so that they were individually frozen solid, not a big solid mass.

I then measured them in 2 cup quantities. Most recipes that I found via google requested 2 cups of cherries. Or 4 or 6, but I totally rock the math, so 2 cups was the magic number. Each FoodSaver bag was filled with 2 cups of cherries and back in the freezer they went. I picked my last cherry in June and the stock will probably last me another month or two. That makes 7 to 8 months worth of cherry cakes, cherry cobblers, cherry pies, cherry applesauce, and cherry jam. Don’t tell Duke, but in the spring, I’m ordering two more cherry trees that he’s going to have to mow around! All because of the FoodSaver.

I have not lost a single food item to freezer burn or spoilage since I purchased the FoodSaver. While I used to clean out my freezer once every 6 months and throw out pork chops that I forgot I bought that were white with freezer burn, I now know that I can trust food in the freezer much longer than ever before. Our freezer gets pretty good inventory turnover, but if my fresh cherries and fresh corn on the cob is any indication, a year or more is not out of the question.

Speaking of corn on the cob, I get asked a lot about vegetables. It is recommended that you blanch corn on the cob before sealing and freezing. I’m going to add another rec: pre-freeze or pack corn individually. My saddest FoodSaver experiment was my first batch of corn on the cob. I put 4 ears into the same bag, and when the vacuum turned on, it sucked them against each other so hard that it popped all of the kernels on the edges where they touched each other. I had square corn cobs. So allow space between them, pack them individually, or pre-freeze them. Then, enjoy farm-fresh sweet corn year round. When I plant my garden next year, I fully intend to take advantage of the FoodSaver to ensure that I have a homegrown supply of herbs and vegetables through the winter.

People love to share their FoodSaver stories with me. Some are funny and some are just downright educational. One woman I spoke to uses her FoodSaver to pack guitar strings for her husband, so that he can buy them in bulk and they don’t oxidize before he uses them. Another person I’ve spoken to had an unfortunate incident when her father tried to vacuum seal a loaf of homemade bread. Bread doesn’t work, y’all. It ends up flat. It might do slightly better, maybe, if it’s prefrozen. Muffins work when frozen. I’ve done a lot of muffins. I will pause again while you giggle.

My FoodSaver comes with this little port here, where I can attach this tube. This can be used in conjunction with many accessories. I own two sets of the canisters. My flours, sugars, steel cut oats, flax seed, and rice are vacuum sealed.

The dog treats are in a matching canister, but don’t get sealed, because let’s face it – Wrecks is spoiled as shit. He doesn’t have time for depressurization when he wants a treat.

Another favorite use of the FoodSaver doesn’t involve any extra bags or devices. I use it to reseal the original packages of many of Duke’s snack foods and the egg noodles that his former roommates will recognize as a staple of his diet. For this application, I am not using the vacuum part of the device, only the heat strip bag sealer.

So here are the results of my entire FoodSaver processing line tonight. This pile of meat took me about 15 minutes to package, seal, and throw in the freezer.

The chicken was not exceptionally juicy, so there was no pre-freeze tonight. The hardest part was organizing the freezer, which has a higher than normal frozen pizza and booze concentration.

Each morning this week as I leave for work, I’ll open the freezer and throw something into the fridge to thaw without fear of leaking all over everything. Tomorrow, I’m going to put together a couple of casseroles and other one-dish meals, freeze them in single-serving containers, pop them out of the containers when frozen, and seal them in FoodSaver bags that I can grab for homemade frozen lunches at work. Life in a FoodSaver-blessed home is good.

I hope that this has been informative. If you have any questions, please post them and I will do my best to answer. Happy FoodSaving!

(Legal Bizniss: FoodSaver is not a sponsor of this site and I’ve never received compensation in the form of money or free products from FoodSaver.)