Storing beans – also known as the poor man’s food save

Storing beans – also known as the poor man’s food saver.


My wife suggested this post because she has a skill that she is very proud of and she is quite good at it.  She is fantastic at vacuum packing things.  Now you may think that what that means is that she has a food saver and she uses it to vacuum pack food, but no that is not the case.  


We did have one and much to my surprise it was great at preserving foods in the freezer like meats that previously I had thought of as best eaten fresh, but I had to admit that many things like ground beef were essentially just as good “fresh frozen” with the food saver as they were fresh.  Pulled pork (after cooking) was fantastic, you could just thaw it over night then toss the food saver bag still sealed into a pot of boiling water and a few minutes later you would have moist, delicious pulled pork.


You may notice that this post is done in past tense – that is because while the machine was great, it broke.  


I have always just tossed canning jars of roasted beans in the freezer and never been able to tell the difference between those beans and food saver beans, but for green beans I used the food saver since they tended to stay in the freezer longer.


Once the foodsaver broke, my wife took over.  She would put foods in a heavy duty zip lock bag, insert a straw and suck the air out.  She usually double lines the packing either by wrapping the food in saran wrap first, or using more than one bag, etc.  The net result is something that is really close to vacuum packed!   


She also never gets tired of delivering the joke, “poor you, your wife really sucks” when she seals the bags (note that this is her joke, not mine).


I have not gotten to try a head to head contest between her bags and a food saver one or even the canning jar solution, but it works well for food (much better than just tossing it in a zip lock bag – probably not quite as well as a real food saver) and has to be better than just letting the air wreak havoc.