There’s No Accounting for Taste

Before we start, let’s recognize and acknowledge ‘There’s no accounting for taste’. It has been a mission of ours for over a year to understand how to be frugal with food without compromising quality. Taste, and quality, are different for different folks. That being said, we have found what works for us and a level of quality of food that we are comfortable with. To produce it, in general, we don’t rely on premium products with a few exceptions. 

Definitions

We will start by giving some definitions for context. These are our definitions and how we approach the tradeoffs we see between money, time, and waste. Waste is an important concept in economies. We will touch on that after we give some definitions.

• The Economics of Scale are places where you can lower costs by buying more. We often see this in membership warehouse stores such as Costco or large-scale retailers such as Walmart. In their cases the volume of buying power allows them to negotiate lower prices.
• The Economics of Time ( also considered Convenience) is how much time a person invests to use, make, or do something. These are usually things like trade-offs between making food and eating out where we weigh the amount of our time to something against the purchase cost.
• The Economics of Zero Waste (or simply Waste) comes from the idea of zero-waste living. For economies of scale and time to be optimized we want to limit waste. If we don’t limit waste, we are losing money and time for items that add no value which negatively impacts economies of scale and time. 

Do You Care?

Maybe? Maybe Not? We found these three concepts are a guiding rubric for balancing budget and life. They lead to feeling better about how we spend our time and money by providing a logical way to gauge purchases. There are times when we have more money than time and vice versa. Everyone has their value systems, and they change over time as our lives change. 

By being conscious of what is important to you, you can save time, money, and waste so they are good to know. That may sound obvious but know it is easy to lose track of goals and focus when life is busy. We will look next at how these three themes affect our personal home economics. 

The Big Three

Scale 

If you choose to make more food at home, you can leverage the economics of scale to your advantage. Many people may know this coming from large families but in general the more you buy, the cheaper the price. In essence, you are mimicking the same idea of purchasing power as any large retailer would but on a personal level.

We are all used to seeing sales where we get 3 steaks for the price of 2 or buy one get one for a dollar more. That is simply marketing to average out a value that entices us to buy more than we usually would. Due to that, you may choose to cook steaks over pork chops that night. Getting a deal is great but buying cooking staples in bulk usually is not the same concept. You may choose to buy 

You can spend less money by weight for items like oil, flour, spices, etc. as you increase the quantity of your purchase. Those are the economies of scale we are discussing.  As the weight increases from say a quart to a gallon, your price will go down per oz.  In many cases, the prices will go down even more. Spices also follow this model. I have paid the same or more for 1.5 ozs of the same spice in a jar as I have for a 14 oz large plastic restaurant container. 

Time and Convenience 

Time, and its partner, convenience is also a critical cost measurement. As in any economy, we are trading specialization and using money as a common way to value our time. The more money we make, the more time we can free up through purchasing time through convenience. This is exactly what happens when we order food regularly. Sometimes makes perfect sense to order out to save some time or as a treat. Ordering out isn’t the only time and convenience vs money trade-off. 

Some recipes are multi-step, and labor-intensive food to produce like lasagna. It is here that we need to start thinking about our time and the outcome of it on a per portion time cost. We can buy a lasagna we like, that is about 85% as good as homemade, and that saves us 2 hours in a kitchen, for about the same cost as homemade for 10 portions. That is not the same as when we make a soup or bread in which we get better quality for 30-60 minutes of active involvement. 

That being said, we struggle when it comes to going out for a sandwich, hamburger, or tacos. Making them at home gives us the ability to control our portions, use items on hand, and have roughly the same outcome as dining out quality-wise. Further, we can make them cheaper and in roughly the same amount of time, we would take to eat out.

Waste

Waste is where the idea of saving time and money can become casualties. The idea behind economies of zero waste is to reuse, re-purpose, and not throw out anything salvageable. In terms of food, this means when eating out or in. Where this resonates with us is the idea of not wasting just food but time and money. 

When you choose to go out, you are paying a premium in money for your food as it has been created through others’ work. You are usually paying a premium time-wise for those portions. For events, celebrations, etc. that may be the intent. If you then have leftovers and don’t take them home, you are creating additional waste which doubles the effective cost in time and money.

This also occurs in home cooking. If you buy ingredients that are one-off or go bad before you can use them you are creating waste. It means you spent a premium for one meal. Why? If you buy say, fish sauce for $10, use two tablespoons, then let it go bad after a lack of use, you spent $10 on a single part of a single meal. 

Putting It Together 

Let’s try and talk through how this works in practice from what we did. We decided to cook at home more than eat out to control our calorie budget. This initially meant spending more time and was less convenient than eating out. In essence, at first, we lost time however, we immediately saw a decrease in monetary cost and waste. 

We then found portion control to be problematic and stored too much food. This created a different set of wastes for us through freezer burn. The lack of variety also made us stumble and go back to eating out more again which was more wasted time not only in going out but time sunk into making things we didn’t eat. 

Where we landed was understanding, for us, what we did well at home. For example, we will go out for Thai or Chinese as we don’t want to store what are one-off items and ingredients. Further, because we specialize in certain areas, we know what we can buy in bulk.  This has led to optimizing through getting good at a wide variety of things we can produce quickly. It has also kept the cost down as we buy things such as flour, cheese, butter, etc. in quantities that allow us to buy cheaper.

We Aren’t Anti-Local

There is a perception that large retailers such as Walmart, Amazon, etc. destroy local community stores. There are tradeoffs to having them for sure. Our point in this post is not to guide you to them instead of other options. It is the opposite. We use both types of retailers as needed and use them for what they each excel at. 

We see each as a specialist in an area. I see no reason to spend a premium on bulk canola oil at a local grocery store. It’s cooking oil, nothing more and nothing less. Conversely, for example, in our small-town Walmart, there aren’t any specialty meats or local flavors. In those cases, we are always willing to pay the premium to a local business. It’s your conscience and value system so you should do you. That is an economy that deals in personal beliefs we don’t dare touch it.

Wrapping Up

We have discussed several economies and rubrics around their use. By learning what is important for you, you can reduce costs in both time and money while reducing waste. This is only an initial post on this subject. We will tie this into how having chosen to keep items on hand and investing in learning opens more options for cost reductions. 

The post How To Make Your Home Economy Work first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

This post is a work in progress with the intent that we cover what is working for us. It is one step in cataloging all of our staples so that we can understand how to optimize our storage space, time spent cooking, and economies of scale in making purchases. This is part of a larger list I wanted when we first started cooking around how to stock a pantry. Since all our searches came up with nothing that spoke to us or our style and calorie budget, we decided to make our own. 

The ‘plan’ we originally came up with was ambitious. We wanted to be able to bake any time we wanted and only go to the store every other week. We also wanted a way to make sure we had items that were shelf stable or had a decent shelf life in the fridge so we didn’t waste food. Why have such lofty goals? It was an experiment to see how off-grid we could live when we retired as well as how much food we could make ourselves.

We also bought items such as cake flour and mixes even though I believe I have made two cakes in my life. While I thought it would be worth trying I had to force myself to make a sheet cake just to use the mix which was a year past its use-by date. When we started our journey in baking, we could make our own baked goods to create the proper portion sizes for our limited calorie budget. It wasn’t that the mix didn’t allow it, but rather we realized we enjoyed cookies, dessert bread, and homemade candy over cakes. 

We realized though, if we hadn’t started this big, we wouldn’t have figured anything out. By investing money into ingredients we forced ourselves to use things rather than waste them. As a result of the forcing function, we learned what we liked, what we didn’t, how much we could make ourselves, what we couldn’t, etc. 

Where We Landed

It turns out it took fewer one-offs for baking than we thought which was an outcome of a couple of things. First, most of what we needed to bake with we used for general cooking anyway such as AP flour, canola oil, and eggs. We hadn’t sat down and realized how few extra items it took until we started tracking our staples for everyday meals.

We also started to realize that bread is simply water, flour, yeast, and salt prepared in different ways and found America’s Test Kitchen Book ‘Everyday Bread’ is a good read on why.  You only need a couple of types of procedures such as the creaming method to create different cookies as well. We also learned that if we wanted chocolate chip cookies we only needed a handful of ingredients to make multiple types. When we switched to oatmeal the next week, again, only a couple of ingredients changed. 

Further, what we think of as ingredients of baked goods can be used in many other things which makes them more general staples. For example, you may make chocolate cherry cookies or whole wheat bread with pepita and sesame seeds for an extra crunch. Would we consider the dried cherries and pepitas as baking staples? Not at all, because we use them to dress up a boring salad or even coleslaw.

Here is a list of items we keep on hand that play a role in not only baking but are staples for other types of cooking. This is not an inclusive list of all items we keep but rather the ones needed for most of our baked goods.

• Flours and Dry Goods
  • AP Flour
  • Cornstarch (Sometimes called Cornflour) 
  • Buttermilk Powder
  • Corn Meal
  • Old Fashioned Oats
  • Baking Soda
  • Unsweetened Cocoa Powder
• Oils and Fats
  • Canola Oil
  • Olive Oil
  • Butter
• Dairy and Eggs
  • Whole Milk
  • Eggs
• Sugars
  • Light Brown
  • Dark Brown
  • White
  • Molasses 
• Salts
  • Kosher
  • Sea
  • Non-Iodized Table
• Nuts, Seeds and Dried Fruits
  • Raisins
  • Cherries
  • Cranberries
  • Walnuts
  • Pepitas 
  • Sunflour
  • Peanut Butter
• Canned goods
  • Pumpkin
• Spices and Extracts
  • Ginger
  • Cinnamon 
  • Allspice
  • Clove
  • Cayenne 
  • Vanilla 

Baking Staples Add-ons

It turned out, that for us to bake a large percentage of additional items we only need the additional items below. Again, this is not inclusive but they are our most used items to produce roughly 80% of what we make.

• Flours and Dry Goods
  • Bread Flour
  • Whole Wheat Flour
  • Baking Powder
  • Instant Yeast
• Dairy and Eggs
  • Heavy Cream
• Sugars
  • Confectioners (Powdered Sugar)
• Inclusions
  • Semi-sweet Chocolate Chips
  • Butterscotch Chips
• Seasonings and Extracts
  • Everything Bagel (EBS)
  • Poultry
  • Mint Extract
• Starters
  • Whole Wheat Bittman Bread
  • Sourdough which right now is in progress. 

From the Broad To Specific

When we started to catalog, we saw obvious patterns occur. The patterns we found were a group of items that applied to all cooking and a separate list of baking staples. This helped us understand what we needed to cook, and then add baking which is an important distinction for us. After making recipes that had multiple exotic ingredients that led to waste we wanted to learn what needed and could reuse over and over. 

First, we will look at Everything Bagel Seasoning (EBS) and canned pumpkin. We only use EBS for making bagels or bread. That’s fine since it has a long shelf life and is fairly inexpensive so we don’t mind storing the one-off. While many only use canned pumpkin for pies, we use it more often for Pumpkin Spice Sloppy Joes, making soap, pumpkin soup, pumpkin bread, etc. Yes, there are a lot of uses for it so we keep it on hand even though it may sit for a while, it is a visual reminder to mix things up. 

Yeast and baking powder are a different set of examples. You can not create many baked items without them. If you want leavened baked goods, at least for most recipes to work, you need them. You won’t need them if you aren’t baking. There is no reason to buy and store them then especially since yeast has a somewhat short life expectancy. 

This post discussed some of our mistakes and realizations on our journey. From that, we have given a starter list of ingredients that are used by many in general cooking. We have also added on a minimum, for our tastes and recipes, a set of additional items for making baked goods. With a little observation and forethought, we believe it becomes easier to avoid wasting space, time, and money on ingredients used only once a year or so. 

The post Important Staples You Need To Bake first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Limiting Scope

This post will kick off a series of other more specific posts. Unfortunately, we feel you could write an article per type of food on how to reheat it. That is problematic time-wise and doesn’t run the steel thread of understanding the processes so others can self-help. It also doesn’t take into account a person’s individual calorie budget and serving sizes. We will get to how those change the art of re-heating. 

The Basics

For brevity let’s limit our discussion to some simple ideas that we can expand on later. We would assert that most of our cooking falls into 2 main ways of transferring heat:

• Convection is the transfer of heat from the air to the food such as happens in an oven.
• Conduction is transferring heat to the food by direct contact between the heat source and the food.

  We would also add there are only two ways of applying heat to cook food.

• Dry methods where the cooking process does not rely on a large amount of liquid to transfer heat. These, in our definition, are methods such as sauteing or roasting.
• Wet methods where the primary transfer is based on liquid such as water or oil. This type of cooking is how boiling, frying, and microwaving work.

Mix and Match

Almost all the food you cook will be a mix of these elements. Most cooking is about water management and reaching a safe temperature for the food. Taking that ride from raw to done imparts flavors and textures that please us such as caramelization via the Maillard Reaction. We may concentrate flavors via reductions of water as well such as in, well, a reduction. This method also applies to items like chicken stock or jams.

Where the confusion arises is that most things we cook are hybrids of the four bullet points above. What we want to do is understand what the outcome from our methods produces to reheat it. Did our cooking create something that needs to be reheated vs a dry method or a wet method? This begs the question do we reheat it through convection or conduction?

Hybrid Examples 

Let’s examine two hybrids, lasagna, and fried fish, to understand what we are discussing in terms of methods vs outcomes. We found it easy to ruin both lasagna and fried fish if reheated incorrectly. When we think of lasagna we see it as a dry convection method. For fried fish, it is usually a wet conduction method. The output is a bit different though.

We would classify lasagna as a wet method like a stew. Why such a weird idea? Lasagna cooks by method provided by its water content even though the heat is powered by dry convection. It is the same process that happens when making a casserole or braising meat. Dry heat in an oven raises the temperature of the fluid in the lasagna to cook it through boiling and/or steaming. A microwave is a wet conduction method as it uses the water in the food to heat it. Practically speaking a microwave steams or boils food from the inside out. That makes lasagna a perfect candidate to reheat in a microwave. 

Have you ever tried to microwave fried fish or fries? They turn out pretty nasty in our opinion but why? They are both technically cooked as wet methods of conducting cooking. The outcome of frying food is to drive most of the moisture out of the exterior of the food and create a crust locking moisture in. If that moisture is then released as steam, you get soggy fries and fish. What does a microwave do, well, it produces steam. That is why those foods need dry convection heat to reheat them

Two Other Variables

There are two other variables in our reheating discussion. They are the concepts of thermal capacity and safety. Most of us want to reheat food to preserve its original quality. In concept our matrix of methods above accounts for most items. Thermal capacity and food safety get in the way of that at times so we will set up how to deal with them here. First, let’s identify them

• The USDA states that all leftovers should be reheated to 165℉ to be considered safe.
• The surface-to-mass ratio of the food dictates how much thermal capacity it has and how long heating it thoroughly will take.

The first thing you will notice is that 165℉ is above what some foods are initially cooked to. Let’s talk about that one a little more in-depth

Is It Done?

The USDA has to deal with a broad population which means groups like the very old very young and everyone in between. That means they must put out safety information that others may not suit all. They also must account for all different parts of the food chain from the field where the cow is raised to re-heating leftover roast. That is a lot of places for bad things to happen and bugs to grow.

To us, if a steak is over 135℉ it is overcooked. That is us, not others. We sometimes go as low as 125F for a roast. That is what you will find many people consider rare and is a common way of cooking it.  Personally, fish over 145℉-150℉, unless deep fried where we don’t notice, is overdone. Won’t reheating leftovers push it past the point we like it? That being our pre-packaged hamburger and chicken is getting pushed to 165℉ because we can’t trust it.

We take a ‘let’s be reasonable’ approach and use the USDA as guidelines. We buy food from known sources. When we prep and cook, we have a clean kitchen that gets cleaned regularly. We store food in the fridge or freezer properly. Nothing gets left in the zone for long unless it is intentional. Simply put, we don’t take a lot of chances so we can cook to whatever temperature we are comfortable with. You need to do you, but when you push the temps up, you aren’t re-heating, you are re-cooking. 

Mass to Surface Area

This is one of the most misunderstood variables and one of the most important in heating. Here are the two axioms to know

• The larger something is, the more time it takes to cook. 
• How fast it absorbs heat is directly related to its surface area where it contacts the heat. 

One caveat to that is the microwave but let’s stick to the general for now. Based on these two axioms, we want to reheat food up to temp as quickly as possible without re-cooking it. What isn’t obvious is that it creates conditions where we want to use the lowest heat possible so we don’t overcook the outer part of the food before the interior reaches temp. 

Important Temps to Know

One last piece of the reheating puzzle is two important temperatures. At sea level water boils and turns to steam at 212℉. The Maillard Reaction, or browning of food begins at anywhere from 280℉ to 330℉. Depending on what sugars are present, caramelization follows the Maillard reaction. Eventually, you end up in the burnt stage of Pyrolysis which, in short form, means burnt. 

Why are these temps important? They are important to know so we get what we want from reheating. Do we care about a crust? Then we don’t want to create steam via a wet method. What if we want to raise the temp of something without further browning? In that case, we want to stay under 280℉ 

Back to the Examples

Our serving size of lasagna has a high mass-to-surface ratio. To cook it without further caramelizing, we need to reheat it at a low temp. Because we don’t want to overcook the outside before the inside is warm, we want to take our time but we also want to eat. That is a perfect case for a slow-wet method of cooking so we boil it correct? No, but close.

A microwave, when used correctly, provides a wet method of cooking that steams the lasagna from the inside out. Oddly enough, as water is removed from tomato sauce it is capable of creating a temperature higher than the boiling point of water. Those temps can cause caramelization and overcooking to occur. Yes, we have burned lasagna and melted plastic in a microwave when not careful. For that reason, we want to slowly heat our food at 212℉. For our portion size of 4-6 oz, that usually means a microwave on half power for 10 minutes in a lightly sealed container to hold in the steam.

Our fish is the exact opposite as they are usually high surface-to-mass pieces. We add it to a preheated toaster oven that is running at 275℉ degrees for approximately 10 minutes. This low dry heat helps preserve the crust without causing more browning. The fish is small enough it heats quickly without being over cooked. 

Wrapping up

In this post, we have discussed some of the basic physics and chemistry involved in cooking. By recognizing how the food was created, and what it has become, you can decide how to reheat it. Truly, no one wants to eat leftovers that don’t feel close to the original food they were. If we can get them close, we can save ourselves time and energy in making one-off meals. We can also control how much we waste when we overcook.

The post How To Better Reheat Leftover food first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Portions Vs Meals

In another post, we discussed the difference between portions and meals. We also discussed what a serving size is and isn’t. Since we know a serving size is something based on what others eat, we want to define a portion as the amount of something you eat based on your calorie budget. For example, you may order a pizza but may only eat two slices of an extra-large pie. Was that a portion or a serving of that pizza?

We are calling that out intentionally as we know there is confusion around the definitions of portions vs servings. This becomes a bit more problematic to talk about in multi-course meals where we have proteins, starches, and usually a vegetable as a main entree plus sides. 

This gets more problematic because when building an a la carte meal, you will need portions that make up all three. When you take home leftovers from a restaurant, you may see all three as one portion of a meal. This portion thing begins to sound a little weird but, no worries, we will clear it up a bit later. 

Portion Planning 

To plan for a month of meals we need to extend the number of items we need to have on hand.  Don’t worry, they don’t necessarily add to our work. Remember we can gain portions from simply cooking a little more or taking home leftovers from a restaurant. Before we get to that, let’s give ourselves a definition and again a little harmless math.

• Number of Diners per Meal (NDpM) which is, you guessed it, the number of people you need to feed.
• A complete Meal we define as a meal that approximates proteins, starches, and vegetables to approximate the USDA MyPlate standard.

Let’s also use the table and definitions we had in the previous post to work through our math.

Running Total of Meals Worksheet

The Math

Let’s assume 4 diners for our NdpM. What we then have for the total number of portions we need to make or have on hand for four weeks is 4 x 84  or 336 individual portions correct? That is not exactly the right number as we had defined a complete meal as containing 3 items. This means our Made To Order, A La Carte, and Snack-style meals all may be constructed of individual items such as a portion of chicken, rice, and say roasted corn. The Made To Order may also be complete as is such as fried rice with pork and vegetables. 

That leaves us with roughly a need for the following minimum and maximum items for a meal. 

Min and Max Items per Meal Worksheet

Putting this all together we would need a minimum and maximum number of meal portions, as shown below.

Combined Totals Worksheet

When we multiply those totals by our NDpM of 4 you will notice that we get absurd numbers of between 352 and 672 portions of food to feed a group of 4 for a month. In our case, we are only two so we get between 176 to 336 portions of food. 

They Are Real Numbers

They are real but not scary. Remember that is how much you need for 4 people for a month. We also need to realize that If you buy a 2lb bag of corn, depending on your and your diner’s calorie budgets, you may get eight 4-ounce portions of vegetables from it. When you cook a 3lb roast, after water loss, you may get ten 4-ounce portions from it. What happens if you throw in some mashed potatoes which are just as easy to create twelve 4-ounce portions?

What happens is that you have just covered a Made To Order meal that covers creating up to two complete meals for four plus extra portions left over to use for another meal. You just knocked out 20 portions in one meal. Wait, it gets better. What about pre-made or takeout? In each of these cases, you may end up with more food than can be eaten in one sitting. Those extra portions can be used to make meals later as well.

Well Duh! 

We spent a lot of time telling you something you already knew….maybe? We all inherently do this type of planning from week to week but maybe not month to month. By being cognizant of how we can plan longer term, and reduce food making to portions we need rather than having not enough or too much. 

As we started to cook at home more, we thought we needed a lot more than we did. We found ourselves cooking and storing too much. We arrived at thinking about portions over serving size or complete meals to help us plan. We also focused on a calorie budget to make sure our meals were appropriately sized. This began to save us time and money over the aggregate. 

This is also a rolling plan meaning after a while, the meals you make help support the extra portions. This happens more naturally as you learn to think about the trade-offs of say doing individual items such as a roast vs a casserole. It also eventually leads to having a larger mix of items you want to eat at home which can reduce dependency on eating out. 

Wrapping Up

In this post, we have discussed the nuances of planning with portions over just meals. At first glance the numbers are scary however they are simply numbers. Once you understand this is a month of food numbers aren’t that absurd.

Further with some lifestyle tweaks, we found we could quickly fill them with very little effort. They do give us an approach to managing our food, shopping, and eating out with a goal of efficiency and reduced waste. Lastly, this approach helps us keep an eye on our calorie budgets whether we want to slim down, maintain, or bulk up. 

The post How To Make Meal Plans With Portions first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

To start thinking about a plan, we needed to break down our meals into some taxonomy so we could talk about how many of each type we would want. As discussed previously in our budget post, this will give us a rough idea of how many of each we want and the trade-offs of making them.  Here is our meal taxonomy:

• Made To Order: Any meal we are preparing to eat when done cooking
• Homemade One Dish: Any meal containing protein, starch, and vegetables in one dish such as Beef Stew.
• Pre-made One Dish: Any meal such as frozen store-bought lasagna or burritos purchased to be cooked by us that contained protein, carbohydrates, and vegetables.
• A La Carte: Individual portions of protein, starch, or vegetable such as roast turkey, mashed potatoes, or corn but not mixed.
• Snack Style: Any meal that is composed of items we think of as snacks like crackers, cheese, smoked fish, etc. 
• Restaurant: Any meal where we plan to go out to eat which can run the gamut from a 3-star Michelin restaurant to the local convenience store hot case.

Why do we need a taxonomy to plan? Because we want to define what we need to store in our fridge, freezer, and pantry in some manner so we can have a known number of things. This classification allowed us to plan how we would use what was stored when we stored it. This eventually led to understanding how much time and money we needed to spend to keep us fully stocked. More on that later.

A La Carte Further Defined

We defined this as a specific way to think about how we stored parts of meals that were interchangeable. The point of a la carte is to have multiple ways to address both our Daily Required Intake (DRI) while attempting to handle ideas covered by MyPlate. Let’s work through an example.

If we have roasted corn as a vegetable side frozen, we can use that corn with many different things. The same for store-bought frozen carrots. We can have them with turkey, steak, or pork tenderloin. They also pair well with starch such as rice, mashed potatoes, and a dinner roll. Due to this mix-and-match form, we stuck to calling it a la carte as each was an individual item to be eaten on its own.

Doing Some math

Okay, we have to do some math here. If that’s not your cup of tea, that’s fine, you can skip ahead to the table. For those feeling a need to understand how we got there, here is the skinny. Also, note we are discussing meal plans first and leave total portions for another part of the post. First some definitions:

• The number of Meals per Day (MpD) and Total Days to budget for (TD) should be self-explanatory. To develop our plan, we will assume most people eat 2-3 meals daily and consider a week 7 days. 
• The Total number of Meals (TnM) is MpD x TD so if you have 3 meals a day for 7 days you will have 3 x 7 =21 meals to plan. 
• Weeks to Plan (WtP) is how many weeks we will be planning for.

Let’s do some math now. We want to plan for 4 weeks of eating 3 meals a day. Based on our math TnM = MpD x TD x WtP. We then get 3 x 7 x 4 = 84 meals. That means from our taxonomy of different meal types we need to decide how to fulfill 84 meals over four weeks. Let’s not let the numbers scare us yet. We will prove that creating that amount of food is easier than it sounds. 

We Figure You Already Know This

There is nothing rocket science here in the math we have discussed so far but we feel we need to start here. Anyone can come up with the above in some shape or form. We started here to set a baseline. As planning grows in complexity, with the number of dinners, calorie budgets, portion planning, etc. we wanted to have some set of initial kick-offs to ground us. Those nuances will follow in additional posts.

Breaking It Down

Let’s put that into a table spread across our meal types. This is our ‘plan’ for what we need. We did this with a spreadsheet but you can visualize this any way you like. This is an example as you may choose different combinations for your needs based on calorie, time, and financial cost of meals.

In this table above, the keywords are running the total needed and we can dig in there a bit harder to explain. 

The running total means the total number of meals we must have in stock for the next four weeks. It doesn’t mean the number of meals we must make for the next four weeks. What this gives us is an idea of how much we need to buy, make, or eat out to satisfy our calorie budget goals for the next month. It is also a predictor of how much we can use in the next four weeks. 

Part of the challenge we faced was overstocking. We want to keep enough meals around to fit our needs without making so many we need a large amount of space to keep them. We found ourselves having too much at times which took forever to use up. Also, we found we would become unbalanced which caused us to spend more time making one-offs than we wanted. 

The totals are not related to the number of meals we have to make from scratch. We can get economies of scale here by making extra portions for a meal, buying multi-portion meals like frozen pizza, or even taking home some leftovers from say our favorite Thai takeout. 

Portions vs Meals 

What we have intentionally avoided discussing portions in this post. We will follow up in another post on how portions play into planning. It is in the portion sizes that the economies of scale start working for us. Since the number of portions needed is a function of how much we make, which style of meals, our calorie budgets, and the number of diners we have, it is best to have it in another post. 

Wrapping Up

In this post, we have discussed how to make a basic plan for the amount of meals you need. This planning helps budget food, storage space, time,e and turnover of items. By doing a little math based on a loose taxonomy of meal types, we can define our needs more accurately. Once this plan is understood, we can look next to how to use it to fulfill our meal and portion needs. 

The post How To Make Usable Meal Plans first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Note: Products, services, and suppliers shown or linked to in this post are for example purposes only. They are not a direct endorsement of them, their brand, or the seller.

Everything Old is New Again

This type of vacuum sealing is not new. We owned a FoodSaver years ago similar to this one that had an attachment to vacuum seal mason jars. We never used it. It wasn’t convenient due to the amount of counter space it took up and having to connect 3 things to use it. Then we found this style and our world changed.

This Started With Canning

Earlier on we learned how to freeze and store food by usage types and times. Our next experiments were in shelf-stable methods. The immediate thing we thought of when thinking about creating food that could be shelf-stable for storage was canning. We knew we could store food by using water-bath canning because we grew up with it. As we looked at canning equipment, we ran across this type of vacuum sealer.

Let’s be crystal clear, as I have read on the interwebs many times about this miracle electric canner. This is not an automatic canner. It is a vacuum-sealing device. If you use it to preserve food in the same way as canning, you may just end up with some weird science experiments with food spoilage.

Canning vs Vacuum Sealing

Canning and Vacuum Sealing are not the same thing. We would say they aren’t even used for the same outcomes. Here is how they differ:

• Canning uses heat, vacuum, and sometimes acidity to preserve food.
• Vacuum sealing uses a vacuum to preserve quality.

In canning, you are removing pathogens and creating an environment in which they can not grow. Vacuum sealing does not destroy pathogens. What vacuum sealing does is remove air from around the food. Some pathogens can still exist and grow as some can live in an anaerobic environment. In general, we don’t vacuum seal those types of foods that are problematic. This is why we make the distinction between quality preserver and food preservation.

But Dry Canning….

We won’t discuss that as it is a heated topic, no pun intended. Each of these methods has pro’s and con’s but our blog is about making it easy. Dry canning is a food preservation method, not a quality preservation method. It also doesn’t work for many items we will want to store at lower temperatures. For example, you aren’t going to put cheese in a mason jar in a 200℉ oven and expect it to be ok.

It’s the Water Too

What is rarely discussed in vacuum sealing is how it helps preserve the quality of hygroscopic foods. What are those? Hygroscopic foods attract moisture from the surrounding environment. These foods draw in moisture from the air. Limit the air getting to food, and limit the humidity’s impact on the food.

This is obvious in some cases such as brown sugar. If you have ever accidentally left brown sugar out in humidity for any period, it will usually clump to the point of being unusable. That same process is at work on your cereal, chips, crackers, and candy. This process will turn a nice crisp peanut brittle into a chewy candy or deflate your divinity pretty quickly.

What and What Can’t You Use This Method On:

Mason jar vacuum sealing is great for items you want to open, reseal, and reopen again and again. It is also great for irregular or soft items that won’t vacuum seal in bags well. Here are a few things we have learned:

Works:

• Any dry goods such as dehydrated fruits and vegetables.
• Baked or fried snack items such as chips, crackers, etc.
• Breads such as biscuits or items with crusts like mini-quiches.
• Candies and cookies.
• Baking and cooking staples like sugar and sea salts.
• Non-food items such as bath bombs, soaps, or other things that contain volatile compounds like essential oils.

Doesn’t work:

• High moisture items such as young cheeses.
• Items destined for the freezer as they will still freezer burn.
• Items that produce gasses such as roasted coffee beans.

The last item above is one of the gotchas with this quality preservation method. As food breaks down, it can create gases. Eventually, this process can break the vacuum seal of the container. While not always obvious at first, you should monitor what foods you store by checking on them every so often. If one is consistently losing a vacuum, it may create gas and ultimately be past its time.

How To Tips

These sealers are almost bulletproof however a couple of tricks help.

• When sealing, press the tool down fully onto the jar, then pull up a quarter to half an inch. By doing this we can get a better pull of vacuum.
• Check the vacuum the same way you would in canning by making sure the lid doesn’t pop back when pushed on.
• After vacuuming, finger-tighten the ring onto the sealed jar. The ring provides extra protection and helps preserve the seal even if gasses develop.

Wrapping Up

In this post, we discussed mason jar vacuum sealing in depth. We offered some ideas on what works and doesn’t work and a couple of tips to make things easier. Also, remember this method is great for non-food items. Once you make friends with the mason jar sealer, you will find you can make more at home. This is due to the fact you will be able to use what you make longer.

The post How To Get Air Out Of Mason Jars first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Impulse Buying Wasn’t The Answer

First, we will talk about what we did wrong that we learned the hard way. We found is there was no ‘easy’ button to help new cooks create a pantry of items they need. We had hoped we could find a series of top 20 lists of what people stocked in their short, mid, and long-term storage. The more we searched we could find some here and there but nothing that fit us. There wasn’t one and for good reason. The reason is because everyone has different calorie budgets, family sizes, tastes, etc. It was the same problem with understanding portion sizes.

When we started, I decided to go all in. In my mind, I came up with all the things I wanted to make and started buying and storing them. That includes things like cake flour, multiple types of dried fruit for granola bars, four types of pasta noodles, and multiple cans of tuna. It was a big mistake. I, realized, well, I have only baked one cake in my life. It wasn’t like we were packing for the Oregon Trail where there wouldn’t be any grocery store for the next 2,000+ miles. It was a wastefully impulsive way to start but it did create change.

Impulse did Enforce a Change

While it did force us to cook more at home to use up what I had bought. This helped us start to produce more at home. there are better ways to approach this. We learned we had to think about food from a storage point of view. It also made us realize just how many meals we needed to keep on hand and didn’t. Out of our experiments, we realized that our food had to be segmented by usage time.

Breaking It Down Isn’t Hard

What we wanted to have on hand:

• Fresh items to use within 5-10 days. These include meats, dairy, vegetables, etc. These are your most perishable items. They are all ingredients in the meals we intend to prepare.
• Intermediate life items that we needed on hand to create meals. These items we wanted to use up in 2 weeks to 3 months. The items range from cheeses to condiments like mayonnaise as well as pre-cooked frozen chicken. 
• Intermediate life items were fresh homemade meal substitutes such as canned chili, soups, and frozen pizzas. These are the buffer foods that keep us from going out by giving us something quick that is on hand when life goes sideways.
• Long-life items that will last up to a year such as condiments such as ketchup to items such as flour, sugar, and salt. In this category also go bulk spices, and dried meals such as macaroni and cheese.

Notice nothing on this list has anything to do with extra portions or meals we made ourselves. To produce meals or augment meals we needed these ingredients which we considered staples. Meals and shelf-stable items like home canned goods are another part of the items we keep on hand but are complex enough to need their own write-up.

Getting to the right mix:

We can’t tell you what will work for you. That is a function of how much space you have, how much you cook, and what you make the most of. We can give you two rubrics to help you decide how much to store and what.

• The more you have on hand the more you will be able to make.
• The longer an item is stored the less likely it will be used.

It is the second bullet point that is the gotcha. We are not homesteaders or preppers. Our goal was not a year’s or more worth of food on hand. Shelf-stable foods such as Mac and Cheese (Boxed Dinners) and canned soups can be stored for a year or more. Due to this extended shelf life, there was never pressure to use them before they spoiled. We had to learn to enforce our own rules to use them within 2-3 months of purchase.

Getting Started is Easy:

You are probably already doing much of the leg work to do this. Yes, that’s correct, it’s your weekly shopping list. By adding a couple more intentional aspects to it, you can take advantage of the work you are already doing. Here’s an approach we eventually found worked and what didn’t.

Things that help:

• Identify what staples are for your calorie budget, portions, and cooking needs. It will be the items you are buying most frequently.
• Think of at least two or three uses for something before you buy in quantity. An example of this is flour tortillas. Tortillas are a blank slate that can be used as a wrap, baked as a cracker, or even made as a quick quesadilla. 
• Remember staples include all types of food from condiments like ketchup and mustard to pre-packaged meals such as soup. 
• Choose package sizes to fit your needs but also your space. We bake all the time but we will never buy a 10 lb sack of flour even though we may go through all of it before it goes bad. This is simply a trade-off for storage space. 
• Staples also includes items that give you flexibility. Having frozen vegetables, fruits, or even frozen pre-cooked chicken on hand gives you easy ways to augment meals and dishes on an as-needed basis.
• Only buy two to three types of things in categories such as rice and pasta until you start to run out of them. Most of us don’t need extensive supplies of different noodles such as Spaghetti, Fettuccine, Elbows, Shells, etc. Having two or three on hand leaves a lot of creativity while keeping storage space maximized. 

Things that didn’t help:

• Buying food out of cooking ideas that aren’t actionable. It is very easy to think you will use a more exotic item but we have found, until you see it on the grocery list a couple of times, it’s probably not a staple.
• Using sale prices as the only motivator to increase the amount you buy may or may not produce the desired outcome. Sales come and go but what is in your fridge or pantry has a date and is taking up space. 
• Overstocking of staples can lead to accidentally hiding items. This problem leads to buying more of the items you already have and don’t need.
• Staples mean things you use over and over again. These are not items to buy in quantity if you are not sure how much you will like them. 

Wrapping Up

In this post, we have discussed how to start planning for a pantry and storage for staples. By watching your grocery list you can start to fill out what are staples for you. Once your staples are identified you can start purchasing items in bulk and take advantage of economies of scale. As discussed, this will also help eliminate waste on guessing what will work versus knowing what you use all the time. We will follow up this post with some thoughts on those economies of scale at a later date. 

The post How To Sort Out Kitchen Staples first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Note: Products, services, and suppliers shown or linked to in this post are for example purposes only. They are not a direct endorsement of them, their brand, or the seller.

First A Cold Background

TL; DR Warning: The first half of this post discusses the history and mechanics of consumer freezing. If you are here for the tips and traps feel free to scroll down further.

Freezing food as a preservation method has not been around for a long time for humans. Yes, of course, there were ice houses and local climate-specific places that had it but for us as a people en masse, not so much. Freezing as we know it today wasn’t something on the consumer’s radar until Clarence Birdseye’s process of flash freezing intersected with the advent of electric freezers. Even then, it was hard to establish a consumer market for multiple reasons.

Birdseye’s work was key to unlocking how to freeze food to have it be palatable when it was thawed. What Birdseye perfected was the process of flash freezing at very low temperatures. Flash freezing minimizes the growth of ice crystals. Ice crystals, and their growth, are what make food mushy and watery when thawed. Minimizing their growth is key to freezing with minimal damage. 

The Mechanics of it All

We all know water freezes at 32℉ or 0℃. It is through the transition of the state from liquid to solid that ice crystals appear. The more water in the food and the longer the time to a solid state, the more likely the damage to the items frozen. When we are freezing non-liquids, they freeze from the outside in. This means the larger the volume of the item to freeze, the longer the journey to freeze. One nuance of freezing to be aware of is that liquids freeze from the top down not just outside in.

What most of us don’t realize is food is only partially water. If you freeze a steak the water in it freezes at 32℉. What about the meat fibers themselves? It takes a temperature of 26℉-28℉ degrees to start freezing meat fibers. It’s not just meat that has these challenges. Sugars, alcohol, and fats all impact the freezing point of an item. 

Knowledge Is Power

Ready to throw up your hands and walk away never to freeze again? Let’s talk about how to handle these pesky problems. Rather than say what won’t work, let’s set out two axioms to help us. We can use these as a guide as to what can freeze well and how to freeze it with the best quality:

Axiom One: The faster the transition from cold to frozen the smaller the ice crystal development in both size and number.

Axiom Two: Due to the nature of freezing from outside to inside, the smaller the volume of an item, the faster it can be frozen.

We now have rules we can use to our advantage! Before we put them to use, let’s do a fridge and freezer tune-up. Most experts will agree the right temperature for a Freezer is 0℉. Fridges have a bit more discrepancy from 35℉ to under 40℉ as 40℉ and above put us in the zone. The reality is neither a freezer nor a fridge maintains a perfectly consistent temperature. 

Machines and Guidance Aren’t Perfect

Both appliances cycle off and on so they may be slightly higher or lower than the set temperature at any one time by a couple of degrees. We also know the shorter the trip from fridge to frozen, the better quality we have.  While we like roughly 35℉ degrees, you will have to determine what is right for your needs. We know this can be lower than the USDA recommendation however, we rather err on the side of cold to help us shorten the trip from fridge to frozen.

In terms of temperature, don’t trust the 1-5 rating numbers or cold/colder/coldest settings on most fridges and freezers. It is best to purchase a thermometer for each unit that shows what the temperature is set to. When you stop and think about it, in a fridge the difference between frozen water and the danger zone is only 7 degrees. While freezers are more forgiving, they too are imperfect machines. Time above 0 may lead to damaged food due to ice crystal growth and conditions such as freezer burn. Pro-tip as well; batteries have no love of cold. This is why we chose mechanical.

Ready to freeze, let’s talk Tips and Traps

Tips:

• When possible remove all surface air contact by vacuum sealing the item.
• Always cool items in the fridge before freezing. Since heat rises, the coldest part of the fridge is always the bottom. Use this to your advantage by placing your items as low as possible.
• Metal is more conductive than other materials. Use this to your advantage by placing items on parchment or wax paper on a cookie or half-sheet pan to freeze them.
• The thinner and flatter you can make an item, the faster it will freeze. A bowl full of berries won’t freeze as quickly as having them on a cookie sheet.
• Pre-freeze items (2-24 hours max) that contain a lot of water or have soft structures such as raw fish, berries, and vegetables before vacuum sealing. This pre-freeze allows the soft structures to harden so they can handle the vacuum pressures.
• Items that are mostly liquid we don’t care about textures such as mashed potatoes, soups, and creamed vegetables, are fine in BPA-free plastic containers.
• Label everything keep a list of numbers of items and be militant about it. When 30 items are in the same type of containers it gets problematic to know what is in what. 
• For really odd shapes and raw meats, you can remove air by freezing it submerged in water. You can place an item in a zip lock bag, add water to it, and bleed the air out through a coffee stir straw. During the cooling and freezing process, it is best to have it in a bowl or baking pan in case of leaks. 

Traps:

• When you freeze sauces or gravies, freeze them in separate containers from their entrees. Freezing sauces can ‘break’ them. When a sauce is thawed it will need to be mixed back together again. This is why we recommend freezing them separately from their intended target food.
• Vacuum-sealed mason jars will not provide the same protection a vacuum-sealed bag will. Only use them for short-term storage.
• When using mason jars with shoulders are prone to breakage in freezers due to expansion of fluids when frozen. If you are going to freeze something in a mason jar, only use the ones with straight sides.
• Don’t freeze items that are larger than you will use when thawed. If you have a pack of 20 hotdogs, and you thaw it out, you need to have plans for 20 hotdogs as refreezing will further degrade them. 
• Resealable bags of items like fries and tater-tots from the grocery stores -aren’t- resealable. Reclosing the bag with the zipper without the air being removed can result in freezer burn no matter how ‘re-sealable’ the bag claims to be.
• Freezer paper isn’t. The freezer paper will not keep air out. It is fine for short-term storage but doesn’t hold up for our longer-term needs.

Wrapping Up

 We have talked a lot in this post about the history and mechanics of freezing as a preservation method. Like many things, freezing isn’t complicated but it does have gotchas. Our tips and traps section lays out some common scenarios, how to handle them, and what is not going to work. These were lessons learned by us over time. We hope they help others avoid some of the problems we ran into on our journey.

The post Tips On How To Use A Freezer Better first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Back to the Beginning

Going back in time, we ate out a lot. It was fun to try new things. Over time, we started to see patterns. It wasn’t just local food patterns. The more we traveled, the more we saw the same patterns repeated. It wasn’t just the food we ate out. If you stop by a country or farmers market, you see many of the same things as great ideas spread quickly even when those items are artisan-made.

As the internet has spread knowledge and people have moved around the US we assert cooking has become less regional. For example, we have had some great New England Clam Chowder in Newport, Oregon which is, was, and remains absolutely nowhere near New England. If we are going to eat the same everywhere, why not just make it ourselves? Ironically, this consistency was born out of the Fast Food Industry however that is another post.

Fries are Potatoes, That is all they Are.

Fried or baked potatoes are fries. Sure, fries vary by name and process but they are still just cooked potato starches. We jazz them up with names like steak, hand cut, double fried, or crinkle cut. The particular type of fry may or may not have some seasoning and is generally served with ketchup, fry sauce, or other condiments. Regardless of the process, spice, flavoring, or final textures, all fries are just cooked potatoes.

You don’t have to agree and maybe it is a huge generalization to say that. Why say it? Because in the most basic sense, it isn’t the fry itself that is where the flavor is. We started to look at this and recognized we ate a lot of basic fries when eating out. It was rarely the fry itself that stuck out as great. The real flavor of a fry came from how they were seasoned and what they were served with.

The A-Ha Moment

While deep frying can be problematic due to cleanup, crinkle, and steak fries became part of our new at-home cooking repertoire. It was also about calories. To fit our calorie budget and health goals we stuck to baked fries such as crinkle cut and steak. We were walking through our local grocery store and saw certain chicken restaurants’ versions of fry sauce in a bottle. I was about to grab it and then decided there was no way we would use 16 ounces (which is 24 servings) of fry sauce at 160 calories a serving. 

This now became a search of what could I make if we had basic ingredients on hand. The basic sauces we bought or wanted were Honey Mustard, Sriracha-Ranch, Fry Sauce, Tartar, and Curry Ketchup. Our pantry had all the raw ingredients on hand because all of these were built out of basics. The basic condiments (Ketchup, Mayonnaise, Mustard),  and spices (Onion, Garlic, and Curry Powder) with a couple of other basic items we used all the time (Ranch Dressing, Honey,  and Sriracha). 

They also took all of 5 minutes to make, didn’t take up any more room in the kitchen, or produce any more waste. Buying them seemed counter-productive when we could make them ourselves in very little time with the ingredients we already had. Let’s shift to the hard ones, which aren’t easy and do take up time. 

If We Could Make Some, Could We Make All?

Making your own bread, hot sauce, crackers, pickles, candy, and even beer doesn’t make sense from a financial or time point of view for too many of us at first glance. That is to say, you can buy all of these items at a low price with no time investment other than driving to your local grocer. Why bother then? Most people will say it is to produce a higher quality item with fewer additives. That is part of the reasoning. For us, it was three simple things.

• It was a way to have hobbies that had outcomes that were things we needed.
• We knew exactly what went into what we made.
• We controlled our portion sizes and limited our waste.

The third bullet point is where the economies of scale kicked in for us. First, let’s talk about hobbies and knowing what we made. 

We Could But Why?

We wanted some of our hobbies, that we paid money to do, to produce value-added items to our life. It is fine to have hobbies that simply are fun to do. When writing out a budget, we took that into account. We realized we could offset some of our non-disposable income from groceries to fun money if the outcome from our hobbies helped produce the groceries we needed. This helped us justify some of our trips and hobbies such as fishing and gardening.   

While we did want to know what went into what we made, it wasn’t as key to us in making things ourselves. The reality for us is reading the back of the package, and the artificial ingredients in store-bought food were not scary. Why? Because to make some of the items we make we had to learn about them by doing our research. This took the fear out of many additives for us though we still did limit as much adulteration of food as we could. 

It’s About Both Reuse and Portion Size

The economies of scale are where things kicked off but not in the way we initially think of saving money. While some of the equipment was an investment, over time, it gets cheaper and cheaper to create the same items. You may need to buy a fermenter to make pickles or hot sauce. That is a one-time investment. After that, the same fermenter can be used over and over again. Same with a dehydrator for jerky which is another post.

What we found was that items lasted longer with less waste. By making our own we could tailor the size of the portions to our calorie budget needs. A store-bought item such as sliced bread has a pre-determined portion size. That is the same with bagels, crackers, cookies, candies, etc. If you want that portion size that is great. We didn’t which either led to wasted food and money or over-eating. It is in the customizable size for each item which makes it worth the time to make it ourselves.

Dollars and Sense

In complete honesty, whether or not it is cheaper to create items at home can be debated. Empirically we see a cost savings for us. The reality is that may not be the case for everyone. Just because the ingredients are cheaper, it doesn’t mean there aren’t additional hidden costs. Gas and power for cooking aren’t free. Your time isn’t free. We believe you will feel more rewarded and have better food and lower costs however, it may not be large financial savings. This is exactly why we consider it part of our hobbies and lifestyle choice over cost savings.

Where We Win

We get to eat the things most people can’t keep in their diet because we:

• Have control of the portion size to fit our budgets
• Know the ingredients so we can make it on a smaller budget.
• We re-use all the equipment we bought for multiple purposes.

After reading this post we hope you agree that learning to make many things yourself helps manage finances, waste, and calories. We assert we all buy convenience items that can be made cheaply and be of just as high or better quality. It also helps divert funds from things like eating out to creating better meals through your means. This frees up more budget for other pursuits and hobbies. 

The post Learn How To Make Versus Buy first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Note: Products, services, and suppliers shown or linked to in this post are for example purposes only. They are not a direct endorsement of them, their brand, or the seller.

It’s Just About Freezing

If you have ever tried to vacuum seal rare roast beef or raw fish, you know it is not simple. What about preserving brown sugar in high-humidity environments where it wants to clump? Did you know you can preserve those kale chips you dehydrated a bit longer through vacuum sealing? Admittedly, not everyone loves kale chips, but it is no different from dealing with homemade crackers or potato chips. 

Before we get too deep let’s set the context that we are talking about what can be done at home with an average or slightly above-average machine. We are not talking about commercial processing or long-term storage. Those types of vacuum sealing require special knowledge, and different tools, and have different purposes like extending shelf life for years not a couple of months. That doesn’t work with our 1-year max timeline discussed here.

Also, we know there are fans of Sous Vide and marination via vacuum sealing and vacuum tumbling. Those are both cooking and processing methods, not preservation methods. We won’t be discussing them here.

What Exactly Is Vacuum Sealing?

What does vacuum sealing do? Vacuum sealing does two things:

• Removes air and reduces humidity carried by the air in a container. This is what happens in containers such as mason jars, vacuum containers, and bags.
• Reduces the surface air contact for the food which only occurs in vacuum bags. 

Vacuum sealers do not remove 100% of the air or moisture from an item. For this reason, considered a life extender and not a preservation method like canning. Much of the reason they can’t remove all the air is because foods are not simple shapes, hard enough, or dry enough. While there are ways of adding oxygen absorbers and using Mylar for preservation, that is another post.

We Categorize This Into 4 Types

There are 4 main types of vacuum sealing methods available to us. Each has a different purpose and targets something specific. We assert while there is some overlap, it is better to focus on learning each before trying to use hybrids.

What are and Tips for the Big Four:

• Pre-cut or self-made vacuum bags are what many of us are familiar with when we first use a vacuum sealer. The purpose is to remove all air and create an air-free barrier around the food. Biggest tip here is that the rough side of the bags, if it only has one, should always be the side placed in contact with the sealing element.
• Items stored for long periods that will be opened over and over again are perfect for air-lock vacuum bags. We find these best for things that we want to keep moisture away from once the original package has been opened such as storing desiccants or oxygen absorbers. People do use them for liquids for marinades. For a lot less money a gallon bag and a disposable coffee stirrer can create the same effect.
• Mason jars are our go-to hard-sided storage for storing items like sugar, dried herbs, and homemade chips. They are best for items that are fragile and would be crushed by vacuum bags. You use a vacuum sealer for the mason jar. An important distinction we make is we are not advocating dry canning. Dry canning is similar in process to vacuum sealing a mason jar but with the addition of heat that some errantly believe to be the equivalent of preservation-like canning.
• Vacuum containers with built-in air-locks. These are similar in purpose to mason jars however ever can have different shapes to accommodate different types of foods that mason jars can’t. Empirically we have only found glass containers to work well. Plastic containers have either leaked or broken so we have stopped using them.

Done with Simple, now the Nuances

All fairly simple techniques are used to extend the life of both shelf-stable foods and help slow the onset of freezer burn. Vacuum bags, however, are not as simple as they sound. They also allow for some of the more advanced tricks to make them much more flexible in usage.  The specific callouts are:

• Standard vacuum and seal which needs no explaining.
• Handling wet items such as raw fish and cooked rare meat.
• Sealing items that crush easily when not frozen such as bread or fried chicken.

Let’s talk about the last two before we get into some additional tips. The amount of moisture in something directly affects how easy it is to vacuum seal it. Moist items like lunch meat take very little additional prep work. Raw meat, fish, and even rare meat can contain too much liquid to properly vacuum seal. As an aside, the wet setting on a vacuum sealer isn’t always going to help. The setting creates more heat for the sealer, however, it is not always enough when foods are very moist.

Handling the Moist and Wet

When vacuum sealing items with moisture the vacuum sealer may not be able to pull down the vacuum level far enough to trigger a sealing cycle. Here are two easy ways to handle that. 

• When dealing with light moisture, roll up a piece of paper towel and create a dam between the food and sealer. This will help stop the flow of liquids allowed into the machine. 
• Pre-freeze for an hour or so when you have high moisture content, such as raw fish or rare meat. You do not want to leave the food in the freezer long enough to freeze, however a light freeze will trap the moisture. Simply place the food on a silicone mat, wax paper, or parchment on a half-sheet pan (or cookie sheet) and allow it to freeze for a little bit. Using the dam technique plus pre-freezing will help limit the moisture. 

One More Vacuum Tip

Crushable items (bread, fried chicken, rolls) take a bit more processing but are similar to sealing wet items. These items require pre-freezing longer until they are fully frozen. But won’t this risk freezer burn? This will not happen in low-moisture leftovers and items such as bread. Once fully frozen, they can be vacuumed and sealed however, sealing should be done via manual or pulse sealing if possible.

Storage Precaution

One of the biggest issues we have run into is gasket damage. Vacuum sealing machines use soft gaskets to seal around the bags. It takes very little to damage those gaskets. It is maddening to pull out a machine that worked fine 3 months ago only to find out it is now no longer creating vacuum pressure. Two Tips here:

• When you clean your machine, gently swap down the gaskets with bleach and water mixture or remove them and wash them -if- removable. Dry them before putting them back and gently press them back in place.
• Never store the machine in a locked position. Over time, this can crush the gaskets enough to stop them from sealing.
• Remove any fluid or material from vacuum holes in the machine so they don’t clog.
• Make sure the heating element is cleaned as well to help extend its life.

Wrapping Up

In this post, we have discussed vacuum sealing and some of the nuances of it. We have given you some tips and information to help your sealing go better. While not a perfect preservation method, you can effectively produce food and stock it in the same way your grocery store does. In our experience, we have found nothing that says vacuum-sealing victory like having a mess of homemade biscuits and fried chicken in the freezer ready to be reheated when the need arises. We hope you will find the same to be true for you.

The post How To’s For Better Vacuum Sealing first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.