I’ve been thinking about grabbing a vacuum sealer for a long time and finally had the opportunity a few months ago. I got one made by Caso, which is an outfit out of Germany, and as you know, products made in Germany are not the cheap junk that comes out of China. If you’re going to buy one, I’d suggest buying a well-made Caso. I got the Vacuum Sealer System VC300.
I’ve been wanting to go fishing and I have a mess of crappie to process and test out my new sealer, but with snow Armageddon going on this winter, it has prolonged our spring. In fact, I had planned on going fishing last week so I could do an article on my sealer, but it snowed Friday. I was in the fishing mood so I went anyway.
Note to self — if there is a good snow on Friday and frost on the grass Saturday morning, it ain’t spring yet. I caught one little bass, so after a few unproductive hours, I loaded up and headed home. We have a feedlot on the route home, so I thought I’d shoot some Eurasian doves and pigeons and try vacuum sealing them. They make great jalapeño poppers.
I stopped by the feedlot and snuck up on a barn where I normally can ambush a few. Then they fly out and set on the silos. I shot a few and then the feedlot supervisor Shawna saw me and circled by to say hi.
She saw what was going on and wanted to test out my new Benjamin Steel Eagle, so we took off hunting. Wow, she was dropping them like flies. She’d let all her cowboys off early for Easter and while we were hunting, a truck pulled in with a load of cattle, so we had to knock off for a second and unload it and then we were off again. She hit a couple off the top of a silo that I bet was pushing a 100 yards away. I didn’t tell her that it’s my gun and I can’t even shoot it that good.
Well, it soon came time to head home, so I pulled over out in the sagebrush to clean them and shot a few ground squirrels to boot. So it was a pretty fun day after all.
I got home and opened the sealer box and read the instructions. Hmm, looked pretty simple. It is an efficient compact sealer. It has a box that clips on back of the sealer that holds the bags. The roll runs into the sealer and of course you seal the end and then run out however long of a bag you need. Then it has an internal cutter to slice the bag off at the proper length.
Then you put your meat in the bag and seal it. The vacuum has a simple keyboard on top so it is super easy to operate. For instance, one button says "Seal" for sealing the bottom of the bag and then the button to do the second seal says "Vacuum & Seal." It’s all really pretty self-explanatory.
They have some nice bags. They’re a pretty thick, stout bag, so they should be semi-puncture resistant. You can even heat your product up to 158 degrees in their bags. I probably won’t ever do that, but it’s good to know.
It has a dual button to select either dry items or moist product. I imagine that I will probably always be sealing meat unless this spring I pick a lot of morel mushrooms. It should be a banner year this spring because of all of last year’s forest fires.
Tom Claycomb lives in Idaho and has outdoors columns in newspapers in Alaska, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Colorado and Louisiana. He also writes for various outdoors magazines and teaches outdoors seminars at stores like Cabela’s, Sportsman’s Warehouse and Bass Pro Shop.
