The One Food Preservation Tool I Can’t Live Without

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In another life…

I had the good fortune to meet one of my favorite celebrities in 2017. Less than a year later, he committed suicide. Several months after Anthony Bourdain’s death, I listened to the book he wrote that launched his illustrious career as a food presenter. I love listening to books that the authors themselves narrate, and I cannot recommend Kitchen Confidential enough as an audiobook.

About halfway through the book, I realized that had I read this when it was first published — I would have been 17 years old, entering my senior year of college — I would have gone to culinary school. No question.

I’ve come back to what I feel is my life’s purpose gradually and at a time when I’m better able to protect myself from falling victim to the worst the restaurant industry has on offer. Just as sure as I am that reading Kitchen Confidential at age 17 would have sent me to the culinary arts, I am 100 percent sure that I would have picked up a drug addiction habit or worse.

My obsession with good food and the tools and skills needed to acquire and prepare said food is controlled by the maturity and physical limitations that come with age, I suppose (I’d like to purchase a $600 knife-sharpening set, but we need a new bed). As I continue to grow as a home cook, I love it when I find products that increase my culinary skills and reduce my dependency on industrial food production.

The tool that’s the subject of this week’s newsletter has done so by orders of magnitude.

Vacuum-sealing your food.

Modern refrigeration is a marvel of human innovation whose impact is difficult to comprehend. Before such innovation, humans relied on salt, smoke, and gut-friendly microbes to preserve food for later consumption. I’m working my way back to these older culinary traditions, but the best way to take advantage of cold storage — I’m talking the freezer, not the fridge — is to seal your food tightly before putting it in the cold.

Sealing food you plan to eat later in a tight container is essential to prevent moisture and air from combining to ruin the flavor and texture of the food. Put fish fillets into a freezer in a loose plastic bag and eat said fillets a month later, and tell me that’s not the worst fish you’ve ever had. Freezer burn is the worst!

Removing most air from a package of food preserves more of the food’s original quality and allows you to enjoy your favorites out of season or sometimes a year or more into the future.

The majority of my food adventures would be impossible to enjoy to their fullest extent if it weren’t for vacuum sealing. I’m able to preserve whole cuts of animal relatives for preparation later (I still have three pig heads from the last three years I need to turn into head cheese), or I can make 30 lbs of sausage from fresh ingredients that will keep for months.

One quick aside, I recently discovered that fish collars do not preserve well. I suppose I always knew this, as all of the frozen fish collars I thawed and prepared after vacuum sealing were not at all edible. Some foods do not hold up well in the freezer, and I’ve added fish collars to that list.

This past summer, my family, friends, and I collected five pounds of juneberries from the bushes outside of my building at my day job. Most of those berries go straight to the freezer to be eaten in pancakes on cold winter mornings when we most miss the summer.

Why this vacuum sealer?

There are levels to vacuum sealers. As with many culinary gadgets, there’s a clear dividing line between home-cook-grade equipment and professional/commercial-grade equipment. This distinction often comes with a significant price increase from the former to the latter, and it can be difficult, sometimes, to find quality home-cook-grade equipment that won’t break the bank.

Commercial-grade vacuum sealers cost so much because their seals must be failsafe for food regulation purposes, and they must be able to perform sealing tasks hundreds of times in relatively quick succession. Those things are expensive.

The Nesco Deluxe Food Vacuum Sealer is a superior home-cook-grade vacuum sealer that should be in everyone’s kitchen, in my opinion. What I’ve found separates serviceable from outstanding vacuum sealers is the quality of the seal they achieve. A high-quality vacuum sealer will maintain its seal for a year or more. Most other vacuum sealers I’ve seen can only be counted on to keep your food well sealed for, at most, six months.

I have a three-year-old venison neck roast in my freezer that’s only distinguishable from the neck roast from last year because I write the dates on all more vacuum-sealed packages.

I also love the Nesco vacuum sealer because it allows you to select the number of seal lines on a package. One heat-sealed line is plenty, but I default to the more robust two lines just to make doubly sure a seal will hold.

This sealer works quickly, and though the manufacturer discourages repeated use in quick succession, I’ve used Nesco’s vacuum sealer to package up to a dozen portions of food at a time without issue.

The Wild Kitchen and a quality vacuum sealer

There wouldn’t be a Wild Kitchen without this vacuum sealer. I’ve taken it with me on fishing trips, and if I travel far to hunt this season, it will come with me.

I bought a freezer to pair with this vacuum sealer, and once we get our garden soil healthy enough to produce more veggies, we may need to buy a second freezer to handle the additional bounty.

I do have significant trepidation about the amount of plastic this device and the general practice of freezing food require. I haven’t found a suitable alternative, other than a massive smoking and salt-curing enterprise, which, as soon as our kitchen renovation is done, I plan to dive headfirst into.

For now, however, I balance the use of plastic against the smell, taste, and memories that immediately come to mind when I prepare food from my freezer. There’s nothing like cutting open a package of red snapper from Mobile Bay and reliving the memories of that trip.

My ambitions for this hunting season are lofty. I hope to harvest four deer, one of which I want to be a buck that I plan to turn into enough ground venison for our family for an entire year. Fifty pounds should do it, which means a lot of grinding (thinking of upgrading to this unit) and a lot of vacuum sealing.

The Nesco Deluxe Vacuum Sealer hasn’t failed me once in more than half a decade. When this unit gives out, I have no plans to buy another brand. As a matter of fact, it might be smart to buy another one just in case…

CONSIDER THIS

The best home cook grade vacuum sealer out there

What are you waiting for?! Go buy one!

Thanks for reading!

-Jonathan