Opinions on different vacuum sealers? Dehydrators?

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Frosty

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Morning all,

I have personally never used any sort of vacuum sealer before, but I've been thinking about getting one lately, and I was wondering what sort of experience you all have with them. What are some quality brands, specific brands or versions to avoid, what is the best at a lower to mid tier level, and what sort of accessories do you think are very important for someone to have.

Along with those, as I mention in the thread title, I have pretty much the same questions for dehydrators. Never used em (only ever dried/dehydrated things using the sun before), so it's another world I have no experience in.


Thanks for any help, hits, and tips.
 
Morning all,

I have personally never used any sort of vacuum sealer before, but I've been thinking about getting one lately, and I was wondering what sort of experience you all have with them. What are some quality brands, specific brands or versions to avoid, what is the best at a lower to mid tier level, and what sort of accessories do you think are very important for someone to have.

Along with those, as I mention in the thread title, I have pretty much the same questions for dehydrators. Never used em (only ever dried/dehydrated things using the sun before), so it's another world I have no experience in.


Thanks for any help, hits, and tips.
Great thread! I too am looking at purchasing a vacuum sealer. I hear some have better quality bags, and some say the bags are expensive! Can't wait to follow your thread Frosty!
 
We have a Foodsaver brand vacuum sealer with the jar attachment. They aren't cheap but you get what you pay for. I think ours was around 140-150 new.. Rolls of bag material is expensive, IMO, we just bought an 11 inch by 16 foot roll and I believe it was around 12 bucks IIRC. 16 feet sounds like a lot but it goes rather quickly.

If you shop around online you can get better deals on bags, and you can also find the seal units cheaper from places that sell reconditioned ones that come with the factory warranty.

The one I bought a few months ago was just shy of 150 new, and I picked it up reconditioned for 49 bucks shipped with full warranty. These are units that people return to stores for one reason or another that have been opened. They may have a scratch, or some kind of blemish but it doesn't affect the operation. Ours has worked flawlessly.
 
I'm looking for a food sealer, so very timely thread.
We have an old round dehydrator that still works, but it seems to dry unevenly. Even when you rotate the trays. Maybe 5 years ago we bought an Excalibur 9 tray model. That thing is awesome. Full range of temperature control. Trays all end up evenly dry. I highly recommend the brand, you decide which model you need
 
I have used several, different brands. My favorite is a food saver with the accessory port and locking lever (FY2000 or FM2100). I don't care too much for the ones that hold their own roll, they seem to waste a lot of supplies.

I generally buy rolls in volume the 8"X and the 11"X. When I am putting up a lot of stuff the machines really get a work out. I usually double seal each end and being able to seal without pulling a vacuum can be nice. All that being said I have worn out a couple of sealers, usually it is due to user error over heating the sealing element.

I found out that many have the accessory port but you have to buy the jar adapters separately (I love mine, but it took some playing with to get it to work properly). The wide mouth unit seems to be easier to operate. Full disclosure, you have to get separate adapters for wide mouth and regular mouth jars.

I find that if you partially freeze the proportioned meat first it seals better (the liquid interferes with the sealing). I also found if I put a cutting board up against the sealer it raises the sealing bag to be in line with the sealer and you get fewer wrinkled bags.

I'm really glad @Frosty started this thread as he reminded me that I need to get a back-up sealer and more supplies in.
 
I have been using a Cabela's brand sealer for many years, and been quite happy with it. My daughter has the same model and likes hers just as much as I like mine. However, the model we have is not longer for sale at Cabela's, so no need in discussing it. I do not know if the replacement model is worth a hoot or not.

You do indeed want good bags however. And these can get quite expensive. The Cabela's brand bags are OK, but not the best. Some do leak after sealing. So I looked elsewhere. I picked up these off of Amazon after reading the reviews:

www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01NAEGXYG/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

They are quite a bit heavier than the old Cabela's bags I had. I like them a lot and will be buying them again when I run out. I used to try to skimp and save by using the continuous roll and cutting bags to the size needed for a particular job. This did not work as well as simple precut bags, so nowadays all's I use are the precuts. More convenient IMHO. I pretty much have standardized on the quart bags for my two person household. This is by far the most useful size for me. I used to think I was "wasting" material when a specific job could have used a smaller bag. But the small job difference in cost between a quart bag (wasting half of it) and a pint bag (using all of it) is really inconsequential. A penny or two. So you're not really wasting much of anything. Also note that you do indeed pay for the "name" on bags. Name brand bags cost a ton more, and I have found that they are no better, and sometimes inferior, to much cheaper no-name bags. But you have to watch out though, some no-name bags are no-name for a reasons, and it's not because they're good.

Good quality bags have one side of them with an embossed pattern. This gives little air channels so the vacuum sealer can suck all the air out. If they bags don't have this, and are totally flat on both sides, then bubbles of air can get trapped inside during the vacuum process.

One thing that I do, is double seal my bags. If liquid gets sucked up to where the heat seal is, it won't seal well. So I do a second seal about 1/4" up from the initial one. So if that 1st seal was compromised, the 2nd one holds well.

One feature that may be nice to have is adjustable vacuum level. My sealer sucks things down really tight (which is good 99% of the time). But for things like shredded cheese, it will suck things down to where your shredded cheese is compressed back into a solid lump of cheese. Since my model does not have adjustable vacuum level what I do is have it suck things down and right when it tries to start the heat sealing process, I hit "stop". Then I let the bag breath a little, still in place in the sealing unit, so the vacuum level is reduced, And then I hit "seal only" - which turns on the sealing element without the vacuum. So it's a poor man's way of doing adjustable vacuum level. But it works well doing things this way on my unit. But 99% of the time I want maximum vacuum anyway, it's just every now and then you need less.

Another trick. When you want to seal up a liquid, soup perhaps, what you do is put it in a plastic container and freeze it. Then you take the resulting chunk of frozen material out of it's temporary plastic container and put the chunk into a bag in your vacuum sealer and seal it in its pre-frozen state.

One other trick. When sealing something like a steak, which can be juicy, don't try to cram it into the minimum sized bag. A larger bag gives you more room for the juices to creep up towards the sealing area without actually making it to the sealing area to cause a bad seal. This is another case where trying to skim and save on the bag material makes things tougher for you. Another trick here, if that steak is so big that you don't have an oversized bag to fit it ... take a paper towel and fold/roll it up into an appropriate sized long thin rectangle and put it on the top edge of the steak and just seal it up with the steak. The paper towel will absorb the juices as they are being sucked up towards the sealing area and stop them before they get there.

Use your Sharpie marker to label the bags with contents and date before you put anything in them. This is much easier than trying to write on them after you have sealed something inside.
 
My wife used to use as small a bag as possible, she uses the rolls and cut them herself. She struggled with getting them to seal. I think I finally convinced her to use more bag so it would be easier.
We buy the bags at Costco when they are on sale.
This machine got high marks from The food network kitchen.

Nesco American Harvest Deluxe Food Nesco VS-12

Not the cheapest at $160 but if your food freezer burns because of a poor machine you can spend a lot more to replace the food.
 
We use food saver with jar attachment, but we have been thru a few. They don't seem to last more than a few years.

We have an Excalibur but did not get the one with the built in timer and wish we had. Like anything else you only regret buying quality the day you pay for it.
 
We've got an Excalibur 9 tray dehydrator (with the built in timer) and absolutely love it. Before we had an ancient oval one from the 70s that worked, but took forever and was fairly uneven in drying. The Excalibur is fast, efficient and drys evenly (at least if you cut up your items evenly). Each fall we have it running 24x7 for weeks when we harvest our garden and orchards, and it's never given us a moment of trouble. Unfortunately the price seems to have doubled since we got ours a while ago, at least on Amazon....
 
I made sausage biscuits for freezer today and decided to use seal a meal instead if plastic wrap. Haven’t used in years and couldn’t get either one to work. Not sure where jar attachment is either. Another day. Wrapped with Saran Wrap.
 
For a dehydrator, I have this one:

Open_Country_brand_ model_FD28SK_Dehydrator.jpg

Open_Country_brand_ model_FD28SK_Dehydrator_box.jpg


I bought it at BassPro shops. Brand: Open Country, Model: FD28SK. The controls on it include ... an on/off switch. That's it! About as basic as you can get. The only thing I've ever done in it is beef jerky. And that comes out very well. I don't think I could be any happier with a more expensive drier (for beef jerky that is, I haven't tried other stuff, so I don't know about that). It is six stackable drying trays, but the manufacturer calls the bottom piece a tray too, so they advertise it as having "seven trays". You can indeed use that bottom piece as a tray, so I guess their description is accurate. I think this is probably a Made In China generic wonder that lots of different companies put their label on ("Nesco" being one other such company). Most of the other companies models only come with 3 or 4 trays, and I like the Open Country brand because you get more trays included. If you pack your jerky neatly and tightly on the trays, you can make a mess of jerky in one batch.

The trays are plastic with a ton of little slots in them for air flow. They work well for this. But when you're washing the trays, all those slots make it kind of splatter dish soap all over your as you rub your brush, sponge or whatever over it when cleaning. It doesn't really get dirty is you do dry rub beef jerky, so washing is maybe optional in that case (just shake off the trays and maybe run a little water over them). But if you do wet marinaded jerky you'll need to wash the trays. Be prepared for a minor bit of soap splattering in that case.

The thing is relatively loud in use. It's basically a bathroom hair drier motor sitting on top of some trays. It's not as noisy as a hair drier though, and not as high pitched. But it's far from silent.

I took a Sharpie marker and labeled each of my trays with a number. So when I am testing out different types of jerky seasoning, I can write down which tray number has which kind of seasoning.

Very basic. Works well (again, for jerky at least - I can't comment on other kinds of dehydrating). Inexpensive. If that's what you want, this is a good one to consider.
 

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