Vacuum Sealing Ground Meat for Freezing with FoodSaver

great lakes prepping here in this video we're talking about vacuum sealing ground beef now i got this big old three pound tube of ground beef from kroger it was on sale i got a really good price for it i picked a few of them up but there's no way that i can use this entire thing uh by its expiration date so what i like to do is break them up into either one pound or even half pound portions and put them in vacuum seal bags seal them up and store them in the freezer until i'm ready to use them so this is a really straightforward process and it's going to be a pretty simple video but i figured i'd quickly kind of go through the steps anyway and sort of show you how i do it [Music] so the first thing i need to do is get my vacuum sealed bags ready now i like to buy these rolls of vacuum sealed bags rather than the um i'll call it pre-made bags because this lets me uh kind of customize it to any size i want plus the rolls are a lot cheaper for the amount of bags that you get so i definitely go with the rolls if you have the option and all i really have to do is figure out about how much i need for each portion of ground beef so i'm gonna break this three pound uh package of beef into uh three individual one pound portions so for that i figure i'm probably going to need about this much vacuum sealed bag now i the meat won't take up that much space but you have to remember that you need a little sort of leeway on both sides so you can put it into the vacuum seal machine and have enough clearance to close that lid so i'll just go ahead and cut my three bags and you know what it's still common for me to make these bags a little bigger than they need to be but that's better than making them too small and then they kind of go to waste because you just can't do anything with them now real quick i'll mention that these rolls come in different uh widths i'll say widths i think this one is 11 inches they also make them an 8 inch which is the one i actually prefer using most often because the stuff that i tend to seal just seems to fit better in the slightly narrower bag without maybe wasting quite as much plastic but i'm fresh out of the eight inch ones so i'm going to use the 11 inch and it's going to work just fine now on the roll these bags are only sealed along the two sides the ends are open so the next step that i have to do is seal one of the ends uh effectively turning this into a bag so on my vacuum seal machine i've got a button for vacuum and seal or just seal for this step all i need to do is seal so when the light goes off that means it's good and sealed i can take it out i'll do the same with the other two bags all right before i start cutting this meat up the one little thing i like to do first is kind of pop these bags open a little bit just so they'll stay open and that way that i can just kind of pop the raw meat in there without having to uh get my meaty hand all over the outside of the bag i can kind of use one hand for handling meat and the other hand for the outside of the bag that way i don't kind of contaminate the outside with raw meat all right now i just have to cut this thing up into about three equal chunks and i'm just gonna eyeball it and and cut this thing into thirds so i'll end up with three one pound chunks maybe something like this i'm just gonna cut right through the packaging this one might be a little a little lopsided but that's okay now there's not really much i have to do to these except stick them in those bags i will however mash them down just a little bit so they fit in the bag and kind of the shape i want well those are definitely not even but they're close enough for for my purposes so i got my bag i'm just gonna put this piece of meat in there doing my best not to get meat on the outside of the bag that's it all right now the last thing i'm going to do before sealing this up is while it's in the bag flatten this piece of meat out more i like to make it pretty flat that way they stack much easier in the freezer i can save a lot of room so you see here i could have made this bag a little smaller i could have probably made this about an inch and a half or so uh shorter than i made it but that's okay it's really not going to hurt anything it's just going to be a little extra plastic so put this thing in the machine ensuring that my edge is kind of overlapping this little indentation here this little drip tray hold it in place while i close the lid and hit the vacuum slash seal button [Music] when the light turns off it's all ready and there we have it the last thing i'll do as always is write the date on it i'm going to write the date that i sealed it and froze it use a sharpie it'll stick to this plastic perfectly fine and not smudge not smear this is all set to go in the freezer so i'm going to do the same to these other two and that'll be it [Music] [Music] so there we have it three pounds of individually packaged and vacuum sealed ground beef labeled ready to throw in the freezer i can keep these in there for quite some time my rule of thumb is about a year for raw meat i'm sure it'll get used before that but that's it there's nothing to it a day before you want to use it just throw one of these bags in the fridge and it'll be thawed out by the time you need it don't forget to like and subscribe to stay up to date on all our latest videos thanks for watching and until next time this is great lakes prepping

Channel: Great Lakes Prepping

Views: 1,369

Rating: 4.9272728 out of 5

Keywords: vacuum sealer, foodsaver, freeze ground beef, storing meat, vacuum seal meat, how to store meat, store ground beef

Id: Jm_6BHFUPGw

Length: 7min 52sec (472 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 11 2021