Vacmaster VP215 6 week Check-in

I had the Vacmaster VP215 chamber sealer for about 6 weeks and have been using it quite a bit for vacuum compression and sealing up proteins for cooking sous vide.  I generally buy meats in bulk, season, seal and throw in the freezer, when it's time to cook I just pull them from the freezer and put them right in the bath.  Depending on the thickness of the protein I'll generally add 30-45 minutes to the total cook time and I'll usually throw it in the bath while it's still heating up.

I have been thinking about the best settings for various items and have found some resources online to point me in the right direction.  Vacmaster has a chart online that gives recommended vacuum, seal and cooling times for several models of the sealers, it can be found here.  For the VP215 is recommends a 30 second vacuum time for meat, fish and poultry, 20 seconds for fresh fruits and vegetables and 15 seconds for soups.  Out of the box the VP215 has a default setting of 40 seconds vacuum time, for some reason mine started out at 60 seconds.  The seal and cooling times depend on the thickness of the bags you're using, the chart doesn't indicate what types of bags the times are for but they're what I use for 3 mil bags.  Thicker bags and bags made of other materials (like Mylar) may require adjustments to the settings.

Dave Arnold from Cooking Issues and his company Booker and Dax (Searzall, Spinzall) wrote an interesting piece back in 2009 about an experiment he did where he compared the results of vacuum sealing three different proteins ate 5 different vacuum levels with and without oil in the bag for chicken and fish and oil in the bag for all steak samples, the article can be found here.  The vacuum levels he used were  90%, 98%, 99%, 99.9% and 99.9% + 15 seconds of vacuum and each vacuum level had one with and one without oil in the bag.  All  bags of each type of protein were cooked at the same time and temperature and in each case the one sealed at 90% vacuum with oil was the preferred product.  The VP215 only allows you to set vacuum by time rather than % vacuum so I'll have to do some playing around to try and get appropriate times to achieve 90% vacuum with and without the filler plates in place.

EDIT 9/27/18:  Was vacuum sealing some bacon last night to sous vide and played around with the vacuum times, with both filler plates in place it took 15 seconds to achieve ~90% vacuum.  That does leave a little bit of air in the pouch so floating was an issue.  The pouch sealed with 30 seconds of vacuum time looked to be 98-99% vacuum and did not need to be weighted down.  I'll probably stick with 30 seconds to package meats just so I don't have to worry about them floating during the cook.

Like I said at the beginning I've been doing a lot of vacuum compressing since getting the VP215 and have really enjoyed the results with honeydew melon and watermelon.  Recently someone suggest trying pineapple sealed with a little rum and it was fantastic!  Next time I try it though I may add a pinch of salt to make the flavors pop.  Might also be interesting to all some coconut to the mix to try and get a piña colada vibe.

It's Here: Vacmaster VP215 Chamber Vacuum Sealer eidtion.

This is one I've been waiting for for a long time!  For the last year I've been saving up my Amazon credit card points and gift cards with the intention of buying a chamber vacuum sealer.  The Vacmaster VP215 was my first choice.  One of the primary things I was looking for was a chamber sealer with a oil vacuum pump rather than a dry piston pump, an oil pump requires some maintenance (changing the oil after a certain number of hours of use) but the payoff is that it will last much, much longer.  Last week while doing my regular price checking I saw a newer brand/model of chamber vacuum sealer called a Vac-Vida VS301 that seemed to have specs very similar to the Vacmaster VP215 but for only $625.  I seriously was considering buying one but there were a few red flags.  The first is that when running the Amazon reviews through Fakespot.com it came with an F rating for review reliability.  This is a pretty niche product and there were only 5 reviews at the time so everything could be on the up and up, but it was enough for me to take a step back and ponder things for a bit.  The other thing that caused me to hesitate is the complete lack of user reviews online, but I did see in a Reddit thread (now deleted) that the manufacture only started selling these in June so it could be that there hasn't been enough time for units to get in the hands of enough customers for user reviews to start showing up.  In any event, while I was trying to decide if I wanted to take the risk of buying an unproven chamber sealer or wait to have enough to buy my first choice a seller put up some Vacmaster VP215 chamber sealers on sale for $670.  Not Prime, but free shipping so I pulled the trigger and bought one!

So here is my new chamber vacuum sealer.  First off, this thing is HEAVY!  FedEx had the crate at 106 pounds.  Delivery was a bit unusual...first day they said it would be here I took a 1/2 day off work but they just didn't show up.  The next day I waited and waited and waited, then at 7:30 pm tracking went to the dreaded "Pending" so I figured it was delayed again so I got ready for bed (I get up at 4:30am for work), then the doorbell rang just before 9:00 pm.  f course I just go to sleep when there was a new toy sitting in a box downstairs so I decided to at least get thing set up.  I had watched a lot of videos on YouTube prior to ordering this so I knew what needed to be done in order to get the VP215 ready for use.  After unboxing and lugging it upstairs I removed the back cover, unscrewed the oil fill cap and added vacuum pump oil until it came up to just over 1/2 way on the sight glass.  Once the cap and back cover were back in place I moved it to its permanent (at least for the time being) home and plugged it in.  It was late by that time so I didn't have time to really play around but I had some slices of watermelon, honeydew melon, cantaloupe and pineapple ready in the fridge so I decided to try some fruit compression.  This process involved putting the fruit in a strong vacuum for 60 seconds then sealing it in a vacuum bag.  During the vacuum phase the pressure is so low that water in the fruit will start to boil at room temperature, this disrupts cells and when the bag is sealed and the chamber pressure goes back to normal the fruit will be compressed.  This leads to some interesting changes in texture and appearance.

As you can see in the picture, the watermelon slice that has been vacuum compressed is much darker than the one that hasn't been processed, it also has a much firmer texture and is "juicer".  The process also makes the fruit more translucent, this was most evident in the case of the honeydew melon, it ended up being clear enough that you could see your finger through it when picking it up.  The only other thing I've done since then is vacuum compress some strawberries with some of the strawberry juice I clarified recently with my Spinzall.

Some final thoughts...

The advantages of a chamber vacuum sealer over a standard edge sealer (like a Foodsaver) is that it pulls a much stronger vacuum, it allows you to seal liquids (or very wet items), you can do vacuum marinating, instant pickles and the bags are far cheaper than the textured ones required for edge sealers (Foodsaver quart bags are a little over $0.40/bag, Vacmaster 8" x 10" 3 mil bags are under $0.05/bag or less if you buy in bulk).  The edge sealers have the advantages of being much cheaper and more portable.

I've been keeping an eye out for reviews of the Vac-Vida VS301 and it has occurred to me that the layout of the vacuum gauge/indicators/control panel on the VS301 is almost exactly the same as it was on the old model of the Vacmaster VP215 when they had user selectable seal temperatures.