There's one piece of kitchen equipment that's used in professional kitchens that I think more home cooks should have at home - and that’s a vacuum sealer.
It may look like a simple appliance, but once you understand the best ways to use it, you’ll unlock convenient and precise cooking techniques, level up your meal prep, save money and store ingredients while preserving their quality.
Here are five ways to get the most out of your vacuum sealer.
Vacuum sealing helps you save time and money.
- Save money by buying in bulk and preserve quality by vacuum sealing: Save money by buying ingredients in bulk and portioning them into smaller pieces. These can be individually vacuum sealed to preserve their quality for long-term storage in the fridge or freezer. You can do this with everything from hams and cheeses to meat and fish.
- The best way to store and reheat leftovers: Vacuum sealing bags of leftovers keeps food for much longer even while frozen and makes reheating a no-brainer when you can defrost it by submerging in cold water or heating up the water to warm through your meal.
- Cook food perfectly using sous vide cooking: By seasoning and sealing ingredients in a bag you are able to submerge them into a body of water set to a precise temperature and cook those ingredients to perfection. Whether you have an immersion circulator or you’re using a pot and a thermometer or even a slow cooker you can achieve perfect results at home.
- Preserving dry goods in vacuum jars: Sealing in bags is great because your remove all the oxygen, but for items you’re going to open frequently that are susceptible to deteriorating in quality through oxidation, removing the air from storage jars is the best way to preserve these ingredients for the most time possible.
- Reseal and preserve most packages instead of rubber bands and pegs: Opened a bag of crisps, a packet of dried fruit or even a large packet of pasta? Tired of a kitchen full of oddly pegged bags of leftover dry goods that eventually go off? Most plastic packaging can easily be resealed using a vacuum sealer which makes for easier, longer-term storage.
Watch this space for more tips and recipes - but if in the meantime you get hungry, find more of Stephen's recipes here.