1767

I believe that KitchenAid used a nylon with gear in their mixers going back decades, to at least the 1960’s. This wasn’t a lack of quality, but was intended as a failsafe, as it essentially serves the same purpose as a shear pin… If something jams the mixer, the worm gear will fail, and save the rest of the metal gears, and the motor.

1768

One Christmas i decided to buy my wife the Kitchenaid Mixer. I was worried that she would be upset because it was a kitchen item and might say this isnt a real present kind of thing.

I was in line it was the Price Club and all the women on the line all around me started to tell me what a thoughtful husband i was for buying it!

Anyhow she loved it and she had it for twenty years. i was much more confident when my daughter and i bought her a newone a few years ago.

1769

Gifting a vacuum cleaner says “you aren’t cleaning the house well enough.” Gifting a KitchenAid mixer says “you deserve the best tool for the creativity you bring to our house.”

1770

So my I’ve been helping my father sort through stuff in his house, helping him tidy up things since my mother passed away last year. We’d been going through the kitchen - my mother was an amazing cook and had gadgets of all sorts, but many of them my dad will never use. Some of them I eagerly accepted, and some I took because I thought “maybe this could be useful.” This post is about one of those latter items.

My mother at one point obtained one of those vacuum sealing systems for food storage. The one she had was a handheld one… specifically this one. Dad didn’t seem to have the charging cord anymore, but I did find one at home that appears to work. There were also a bunch of the bags for use with the sealer, but they all kind of have a “this has been sitting around unused for years” smell to them and I’m not sure I want to put food in them.

I googled for the required bags and it seems that while they can be found, they mostly seem to be through third party resellers and selling them for a fortune.

My question is - are these vacuum sealers all they’re cracked up to be, or were they really just a fad that’s long since past (which would explain why the bags are hard to come by)? Should I bother trying to find bags for this thing? In all honesty, it’s not like I do a load of bulk cooking and often need to seal and freeze things… only occasionally.

Thoughts and/or first hand experience welcome. :)

1771

I think the best use for vacuum sealers these days is sous vide cooking. I don’t think there’s that much benefit when e.g. freezing that you can’t accomplish with an extra bag or an extra layer of saran wrap.

I certainly wouldn’t pay a premium for the bags, given that buying into a whole new modern system is probably cheaper and better.

1772

I use my vacuum sealer mainly for sous vide. But also for freezing food. I would say yes, very worth while. OTOH if I were you I might get a new one.

Edit: Or what the guy above me said. :)

1773

Aha, I hadn’t even considered sous vide cooking, mainly because it’s something I have not done (though I’m very much interested in it and may one day grab an Anova and give it a go). Definitely worth keeping in mind. And yeah, in general when I’m freezing something I do tend to give it extra wrapping to prevent freezer burn and so far haven’t had a problem.

It does seem like I’d be better off with something new though if it looks like it’s something I’d be using more regularly (if I jump on the sous vide bandwagon). Thanks to both of you!

1774

I do a bunch of vacuum bagging, but 80% of it is for sous vide. It is pretty useful for freezing too though.

I would also echo the comment about not buying proprietary bags. If it needs them, and you still want to vacuum seal, get one that takes rolls. Way cheaper.

1775

I did a little further googling and found this video where a guy uses his vacuum sealer with regular ziploc bags. Seems simple enough and I might give it a try at least for freezing stuff in the short term (if it turns out to not be too fiddly), but would probably still be inclined to buy a new unit if I start doing sous vide cooking regularly.

1776

Hansey my wife just got me a new one for my birthday so I’m in your boat of … what all can I do with this?

I have a sous vide and will use it for that but I -can- tell you one thing I will be using mine for and that’s for sealing smaller portions of large meat purchases or parted chicken/etc into smaller portions. Freezer burn is not just about wrapping to prevent the moisture loss, it’s also about minimizing air around the item, etc. What better than vacuum sealing for that?

For reference on your bag costs, she got me a Foodsaver model and Amazon has tons of options I can use for them. I don’t know how big the bags are your unit uses but hopefully that helps compare costs. I had thought they were pretty standardized though so I’m not sure why yours would be more expensive? Another thing to keep in mind is that your unit lacks a sealer.

One of the things I did not think about though was other items that benefit from less oxidation spoilage: things in the fridge, pantry, etc can also benefit and they make containers, stoppers and other items for those.

1777

I use mine for jerky, definitely extends the life by a bunch. I also buy some items in bulk that I normally wouldn’t and seal off the excess, I get some decent economies of scale that way. Also really good for anything you’re going to freeze, keeping air off it will prevent freezer burn. I’m a fan.

Oh, and probably my most frequent use, resealing bags of chips or crackers after I snack on them. So nice to have a bag of chips last a month.

1778

I’d been ghetto sealing things for a while now and my wife saw that and joked about it a couple of times. Things like putting sous vide items in a super large freezer ziploc, immersing them in water and using the water pressure to push air out until near the top then I’d seal it. It works semi-okay. For sous vide though you really want as little air as possible as that also makes the item buoyant, so there were tricks like putting spoons in the bottom of the bag, etc.

But I also would pour chips into a smaller back and try to push out the air, crackers, cheeses, leftovers, etc.

So, it’s a good purchase for me, just something I need to get used to now.

1779

Yeah, I admit I didn’t search too long for the bags, but the first few I found were like 10 bags for $20, which seemed a bit much. It may be that the bags for the handheld units are more specialized and therefore more expensive? Or I just didn’t look hard enough, hehe.

But yeah, no sealer on my unit… it relies on using bags with a ziploc type top and then a special part of the bag that you hold the unit to to get the air out.

1780

I use my vacuum sealer not only for sous vide and freezing, but both. I’ve set up meals that are ready to sous vide, and then frozen the bag with all the ingredients ready to throw in the water later. I typically do this with proteins.

For example, you can set up a bunch steaks or burgers, seal em up and freeze them in the bag, then go right from the freezer to the water bath a month later when you’re ready. The fact that the food is frozen would add some time to the cook, but since sous vide times are so long to begin with it doesn’t really change the total time.

I wound up doing this a ton when there were various shortages early on in the pandemic, and you wouldn’t see certain products for a while - I don’t do it nearly as much now. However, defrosting / warming already cooked frozen food in a waterbath is incredibly convenient.

1781

You can also just boil the bag for a lot of things, not as fool proof as sous vide obviously but I made plenty of tasty chicken dishes that way when I got my first vacuum sealer 15+ years ago.

1782

You can throw some seasonings, like fresh herbs, in before the sealing and the flavor will infuse the meat very well. Just be careful what you throw in there. Some things will denature the protein and you end up with a bag full of mush.

1783

I’ve done big batches of chow mein this way. Bagged and froze the excess and then just boiled it in the bag for an easy lunch in the future.

1784

Eh, that doesn’t sound like a great thing to continue using. Regular bags in preform or rolls should be closer to a few dimes each, not dollars.

1785

I can echo what others have said. I find a vacuum sealer an indispensable tool for sous vide cooking. I have a nice Food Saver model and I get my bags off Amazon. They are 3rd party bags that work great and are way less expensive than the Food Saver bags. Since the bags are not very costly, I also use them when freezing food. One nice thing about sous vide and freezer bags is that you can pull the bag out of the freezer and put it in a sous vide bath. No pre defrosting needed. I prep and freeze sous vide meals often. When I am ready to prepare them I just pull them out of the freezer and pop them in the sous vide bath.

1786

Re: sous vide, my first gen Anova broke, so I bought the Monoprice Strata immersion circulator.

While I can speak to durability, it is almost 100% identical to the first gen Anova, other than not having wifi or Bluetooth. But the construction (casing, screen, control dial) appear to be exactly the same. I’d be surprised if they didn’t come off the same factory line.

I actually find not having wifi or Bluetooth to be a plus, because the Anova didn’t like staying connected to my wifi, and the Bluetooth was a pain because it would always complain when I walked out of Bluetooth range, and it would constantly try to sync the status to my phone which was basically a lot of beeping and notifications for nothing. The monoprice one I just set the time and temp on the wand and walk away. Its not like I’m ever out of earshot of it’s beeping anyways.

https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=21594