I had never heard of the Food Saver until an email landed in my inbox just before Christmas asking if I would like to try one out. We all know that Christmas is a time when there is a lot of leftover food going spare – day old Turkey sandwich anyone? As a family we throw LOADS of food away and it is something which really annoys Hubby and I, we are both very aware of the children starving in third world countries and even in our own so it isn’t something we take lightly but with fussy eaters like the Beans we do struggle.
When doing the food shopping I try to shop smart and I check for fruit, vegetables and meats which have just been marked down so that we can freeze them but still they somehow work their way to the back of the freezer and by the time we find them again, they have been in their for too long and need to be thrown away. This is where the Food Saver is going to be a great piece of kitchen equipment for us going forward.
For those of you who haven’t heard of the Food Saver who have watched Master Chef before it’s basically a vacuum packer which sits neatly on the worktop or in the cupboard and takes up very little space. When you have food which you want to store rather than consume straight away you simply pop it into the special bags or special bagging roll, press a button and the Food Saver sucks all the air out of the bag and heat seals the food so that it can be stored fresher for much, much longer. Or in Little Bean’s terminology . . .
“it’s a bit like a laminator for food”
Before Christmas we were given a spare freezer to keep in the garage to store excess food and I’m not seeing the perfect opportunity to buy our meat and vegetables in bulk from now on. When vacuum sealed they also take up less space and you can write the date on the packaging so that you know how long it has been frozen for. It is worth checking out the FAQ on the Food Saver website as to which items need freezing before Vacuum sealing. If you are lucky enough to know someone with an allotment (wink wink to my MIL) the Food Saver would be great for storing excess vegetables rather than letting them go to waste.
The Food Saver unit we received came with a pack of bags, a bag roll and a special tube which can be used to vacuum seal special Food Saver canisters. All of the bags which you use with the food saver are BPA-free and reduce the risk of freezer burn in frozen food. When all the air and moisture has been sucked out of the bags/containers it means that moisture and air cannot get in which also seals in the goodness and enables them to be stored for up to 5 x longer!!!
Other great uses for the Food Saver include:
- seal Silver items to prevent tarnishing
- keep travel fluids leak-free
- protect important documents
- protect valuable jewellery
- protect old photographs which can be damaged by moisture in the air