What to look for in a Food Saver

Nalge sells plastic bottles (Nalgene) for the lab and the field which have a rim seal which is ‘guaranteed to not leak’. Some of them are popular water bottles – but not cheap. However, from sad experience, I can tell you that while water may not leak out of them, olive oil DOES! Fortunately the bottle was in a double plastic bag, but the bags were not salvagable.

Cheers

So while I have used a Food Saver for the past 17 years I do not do liquids anymore. To be blunt, I just buy single serving packets of all liquids (minimus.biz) and things like artichokes go into snack bags.

The machine gets nasty and dirty with liquids and frankly….it’s cheaper to buy the packets.

Food Saver is a worthy investment, if you get one with a port for a hose, for keeping things sealed long term (we have the mason jar adaptors to seal in our pantry) and we use the bags to keep things sealed like compasses, fire e kit, etc that we don’t often use.

Since we catch 30 salmon and 6 halibut each year (plus berries and rhubarb) we do a lot fo vac-packing in a Food Saver.

For liquids (and berries), freeze them first, then vac-pack them.  Otherwise, the liquid gets sucked up into the vac-packer, mucks it up, and ruins the seal.

You can hit the “manual seal” button without the vacuum, but that is no different than putting the liquid in a ziplock bag and freezing it for our purposes of long-term storage at home, but for trail use, it would give you the liquid in that sturdier, better-sealed plastic.

If I wanted a water-based liquid sealed in with no air, I’d freeze it in an unsealed vac-bag bag (so it froze into a bag-sized shape), then vac-pack and heat-seal it.  Most oils will freeze solid in a freezer and you could do the same with them.

Two, unrelated vac-packing tricks:

Freeze berries on wax paper on a cookie sheet BEFORE vac-packing them.  Then you end up with whole, intact berries months later instead of a glacier of frozen berry mush.

You can “glaze” frozen meats and fish with a mist of water several times to build up a layer of ice around the meat.  While that is sort of belt-and-suspenders since the vacuum bag is supposed to provide that protection, it does help with long-term (several years) storage.  It is also a way to use zip-lock bags, Saran wrap, or freezing paper in lieu of vac-packing bags.

Third, bonus vac-packing trick:

For great water protection for seldom used items (emergency toilet paper, a selection of OTC pills like Benadryl, ibuprofen, etc), I vac-pack them.  It makes the toilet paper really small but mostly it’s better protected than in any ziplock bag.

I’ve sewn a lot of pockets on my life jacket and always have a VHF radio, EPIRB, cordage, a knife, some food, TP, etc with me on my body WHENEVER I’m in an open boat.