Cedar Rapids Brewing Society

Dude, I blew through my first roll of bag material in one afternoon! This thing is da' bomb!

Resealed all my bulk spices in the pantry (leaving extra room like Matt said), went out and stocked up on meat (steaks and chicken), and tried out the "freeze and steam" bags - did a can of whole kernel corn in blood orange olive oil and tarragon (worked super!) Also, tried out the marinade canister - so, so. To try it out, I did it just before I threw the steak on the grill. Next time, I'll leave the meat in longer than they said to in the instructions.

Probably one of the best things I've ever bought! And I have a LOT of kitchen gadgets!!

Another follow-up endorsement.

I just went out to the freezer in the garage where I stashed my homegrown hops harvest. These were put up in the ZipLoc(TM) Vacuum Bags (hand pump system). Almost every one of them had lost their vacuum since Aug/Sept/Oct when I put them up.

So, I used the FoodSaver's vacuum bag attachment and re-vacuumed them in the same bags - draws a better vacuum than the hand pump. Some of them begun to loose vacuum within minutes!! I checked the ziplock seals and re-did them. Same result. All I can say is that these bags SUCK!! This is what happens when you go cheap!

So, I just got through re-doing all of my old ZipLock bags.

As an experiment, I cut off the tops off of some of the ZipLock bags and used the FoodSaver to re-vacuum and seal them. Let's see if that works, as the ZipLock Vacuum Bags are cheaper than the FoodSaver ones.

Interesting. Keep us posted. I was digging around in my deep freeze the other day as I was finishing up re-sealing some hops I'd used to brew with on Tuesday and found some various meats that had gotten terribly freezer-burnt. Made me wonder how well/long they would have lasted if I'd had the foodsaver then. Also, I wish there was a way to reseal the foil hop bags. I suppose that's far more industrial than these consumer grade products though...