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felpec · July 1, 2007

Got my VS-280 sealer on Friday - thanks, MacDuff, for the link to their website. After extensive research (which means we played with it all day yesterday), here's what I found so far:

We put up a couple of pounds of snap peas. Blanched lightly and pre-froze them on a cookie sheet. Did half in the boil-in-bags with a pat of butter and half in regular bags for stir frying, etc. Worked great.

Blanched and pre-froze about fifteen heads of broccoli - worked great for them, but it took a bit longer to get all the air out from around the heads. We found we had to kind of manipulate the bag around the vacuum snorkel thing a bit to get more air out, but once we did one or two, it was easy.

We re-sealed our Brussel sprouts from last fall. Again, did a few in the boil-in-bags we bought with the sealer, and some plain. We tried the boil-in-bag last night for dinner, and they were just perfect.

We tried chicken legs - worked great. Didn't even bother to pre-freeze these. Today, we're trying sausage. No matter how well I wrap pork, it always seems to taste funny in about a month.

We tried to reseal Ziploc freezer bags. We could get them to seal, but not retain the vacuum. We tried different times of sealing, but it seemed that the plastic melted very quickly and didn't really keep a good seal. I was hoping that would work, because I now have a whole drawer full of Ziploc bags that I used to use for freezing...we'll keep experimenting!

We got the best results from pre-frozen items in one layer that filled the whole bag. If the bag was just a bit too long, we started trimming off the excess (about an inch or so) and got a much better vacuum. They stack better in the freezer, too. Very pleased with it so far.

Well, except for the manual. It's pretty useless but absolutely hilarious (a typical Asian translation to English). There's a table of foods on the last page (the purpose of which I could not determine) which lists such common American dinner items as:
toadoil, pig's brain, snake, dog, coarse gigins, whito goored, cornpickled beancurd and the list goes on...

July 1, 2007	#8
felpec Tomatovillian™ Join Date: Mar 2006 Location: Zone 5/6 New Jersey Posts: 122	Got my VS-280 sealer on Friday - thanks, MacDuff, for the link to their website. After extensive research (which means we played with it all day yesterday), here's what I found so far: We put up a couple of pounds of snap peas. Blanched lightly and pre-froze them on a cookie sheet. Did half in the boil-in-bags with a pat of butter and half in regular bags for stir frying, etc. Worked great. Blanched and pre-froze about fifteen heads of broccoli - worked great for them, but it took a bit longer to get all the air out from around the heads. We found we had to kind of manipulate the bag around the vacuum snorkel thing a bit to get more air out, but once we did one or two, it was easy. We re-sealed our Brussel sprouts from last fall. Again, did a few in the boil-in-bags we bought with the sealer, and some plain. We tried the boil-in-bag last night for dinner, and they were just perfect. We tried chicken legs - worked great. Didn't even bother to pre-freeze these. Today, we're trying sausage. No matter how well I wrap pork, it always seems to taste funny in about a month. We tried to reseal Ziploc freezer bags. We could get them to seal, but not retain the vacuum. We tried different times of sealing, but it seemed that the plastic melted very quickly and didn't really keep a good seal. I was hoping that would work, because I now have a whole drawer full of Ziploc bags that I used to use for freezing...we'll keep experimenting! We got the best results from pre-frozen items in one layer that filled the whole bag. If the bag was just a bit too long, we started trimming off the excess (about an inch or so) and got a much better vacuum. They stack better in the freezer, too. Very pleased with it so far. Well, except for the manual. It's pretty useless but absolutely hilarious (a typical Asian translation to English). There's a table of foods on the last page (the purpose of which I could not determine) which lists such common American dinner items as: toadoil, pig's brain, snake, dog, coarse gigins, whito goored, cornpickled beancurd and the list goes on...