I wanting to get a vacuum sealer to freeze crappie. What is the best and most economical brand? I lso will be freezing beef and vegetables. If anyone has one that they recommend I would appreciate it,
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I wanting to get a vacuum sealer to freeze crappie. What is the best and most economical brand? I lso will be freezing beef and vegetables. If anyone has one that they recommend I would appreciate it,
I have a food saver game saver delux and love it!
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I got the new one that stands up so it don't take up much room, one thing you might to do is fold pieces of paper towel up to catch sone of the water, of freeze first and then seal.
I'll 2nd what Mr. Willis said. I've got one of the older (about 10 yrs) FoodSaver sealers. When it stops working, I'm going to get one of the new FoodSavers that stands upright. Also, I strongly encourage pre-freezing all of your meats before you seal them. I put all my ducks, geese, fish, beef, etc. on a cookie sheet with wax paper and let it sit in the freezer until it is frozen to the touch. This gets the meat hard enough to facilitate a good vacuum around the meat. I still have the occasional bag that breaks a seal for some reason or another, but all in all I have great results. I tried sealing without freezing first, and had very spotty and limited success. I just cooked up some ducks that were sealed in early '09 and they tasted great! A good vacuum sealer is a must for any outdoorsman!
I got a Foodsaver, too. Got mine at Target and you can find inexpensive versions all over including quite a few neighborhood hardware stores, not just in the big box ones.
Prefreezing or at least stiffening meats and fish before vacuum sealing them also pretty much does away with the juice the unit will pull out of fresh meats and fillets, not only giving better seals but also making clean up easier.
Just prefreeze enough to stiffen the liquids is all that's needed. You can lay fillets out flat on a cookie sheet inside a larger plastic bag for that and then they will vacuum flat and are much easier to store with the fillets also staying separate; so you don't have to thaw the whole works just to get out part of the contents. Lay the layer on wax paper so that it does not freeze to the cookie sheet, and you can add additional layers with wax paper between them and still get pretty nice flat fillets that will seal up beautifully.
Bags are generally reuseable and resealable.
I've started buying generic bags on eBay for my foodsaver. It's much cheaper than name brand and the seal just as well.
I tired the pre freezing method this weekend. I had 3 layers of fish and wax paper. I left them to freeze over night. They were pretty tough to get off of the paper, as they were frozen pretty hard. Maybe I shouldnt freeze them quite so long? But they did seal up nice.