Re: Snorkel vs foo saver

[Scott Mark]

My chamber sealer is a Vacmaster VP-112. Oddly, it is cheaper than the other (TRULY commercial) Vacmaster units, and it ALSO accepts larger bags! (It doesn’t draw quite as hard a vacuum, and it doesn’t have two sealing bars)

I am in love with it. For thanksgiving we bagged about 18 qts of turkey stock in 13 bags, total liquid.

We bagged my son’s venison. The leftover turkey. Leftover soup. Mashed potatoes and gravy in separate compartments of a single bag.

I drybagged a 15 lb sirloin subprimal. The sealer isn’t big enough to hold a full strip or ribeye, but if the sub-primal were cut in half into two bags I think it it would work. I think it will do the “roast” size of drybag and certainly the dinner party size.

I think the bags are cheap. From < 10 cents to about 15 cents, I think. My plan is to finish dry-aging the sub-primal, then do all the trimming I plan to do. Steak it out, and seal two steaks in a bag. Freeze most of them. From the freezer, they get thawed and then into the sous-vide (or other method) for a couple of hours, then finished with grill, frypan, or blowtorch. You need to observe some simple precautions with liquids, but otherwise it's such a huge convenience. And if you make a terrible mistake, cleanup is pretty easy, and no fear of getting liquids into your pump. And many other interesting things are possible, like removing the "air" in meats or vegetables or fruits and replacing the air with flavorings, picklings, spirits... I really like my Vacmaster.