Make the Reynolds Vacuum sealer more useful

My dad and I were discussing how this little product is actually quite expensive. The vacuum itself isn’t really that expensive, I paid $7.00 for mine. They have been running $2.00 coupons in the paper and our local grocery store had the product on sale for $9.00. The problem isn’t the vacuum but the cost of the bags. I bought a box of gallon bags, 9 bags to be exact. This cost me an additional $3.29 or roughly $.37 per bag. Ouch! You better have some really great things to freeze.

I was attracted to the idea because I freeze a lot of the vegetables out of our garden. Unfortunately, I might as well just buy the vegetables from the grocery for that price. Well, I did have another idea.

I bought the gallon size because I felt that I could place an ordinary quart freezer bag inside of the gallon sized vacuum bags and it would take the air out of both of them. If you want to play, you can do just that.

Here are some caveats.

• The vacuum sealer is slow. It takes about 10 to 15 seconds to take the air out of my test bags.
• The seal on the quart bag will indeed seal up before the air is drawn out if you don’t follow my technique

To successfully take the air out of the bag inside of the vacuum bag you need to offset the top edges of the bag so that they don’t seal. It is easier to seal the bag after the air is removed if the gap is at the edge. However, I found that it really doesn’t matter that much. During my tests, I realized that the bags seal tight enough that most times the bag will still keep its vacuum outside of the vaccum bag without the edges being sealed. This makes it easy to seal the edge with your fingers rather than trying to do this inside of the vaccum bag. But once again, pressing down the seal through the vacuum bag was never difficult.

So, if you want a diversion you can give yourself a new toy for the kitchen. Just don’t expect it to be a professional tool even with the bags that are supposed to be used with the vacuum sealer.