Vacuum Sealing

Readers often ask how I vacuum seal our food. There are several tools I use, depending on what I’m vacuum sealing.

Food Saver

Post about Food Saver

We use our Food Saver a lot. We buy meat on sale or when we find large packages that are less than smaller packages. We buy Food Saver “bags” on a roll that we cut to the size we need. There are other brands of vacuum sealers but some of them are outrageously expensive and are more commercial looking where the Food Savers can be found on sale at a reasonable price, are fairly lightweight and easy to stick in a cabinet when not in use.

Jar Attachment for Food Saver:

Jar Sealer Blog Post – This is useful for sealing jars. I use half gallon jars for storing extra grain, rice, cereal, beans, etc. I use quarts or pints when I buy spices in bulk.

I’ve heard that the jar attachments are a bit hard to find now but I haven’t searched for them to see for myself since I have them already.

Vacuum Chamber:

Build Your Own – Due to liability risks (you know how people can be these days), we listed some links that Vince found helpful but Vince did not give specific instructions for how he built ours. There’s enough there that you can build your own if you’d like.

Testing the Pot – We ran a few loads and made sure it worked.

The advantages to using this over the jar attachment for the Food Saver:

• For whatever reason, I have much better luck with these jars staying sealed.
• I can do 7 quarts at once and it takes about 3 minutes. With a larger canner, I could do even more jars.
• I can seal any jars – even the ones that come with salsa, pasta sauce, etc. If it’s a jar you twist to unseal (hear the little center indention pop up when you open it), you can vacuum seal it in a vacuum chamber. It’s nice to use jars I would have otherwise thrown away. These are great for giving away or using for snacks in the car and if we want to toss them, we can (but I usually save them!).
• If using the Food Saver jar attachment, it doesn’t fit odd sized jars.

In the above photo, you will see that I’ve used a couple of jars that other foods came in.

I vacuum seal almost all my freeze dried foods in jars and keep those in a dark closet. I feel it’s much more secure than my mylar bags and the jars are re-usable . . many times!

In summary, for anything wet that will be stored in the freezer – meat, fruit, frozen veggies, I vacuum seal using the Food Saver and bags.

For anything dry that can be stored on the shelf, I use jars either sealed with the Food Saver jar attachment or my homemade vacuum chamber.