Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsExpensive but awesome
Reviewed in the United States on November 19, 2010
I'm reviewing this from the perspective of a home user. If you are a light commercial user...it'll work fine for you, assuming the chamber is big enough and it has the features you need.
Anyway...
This is my third vacuum bagging appliance and my first chamber style unit. I am a big fan of vacuum storage, not just for prolonging the life of foods but also to infuse different flavors and create ready-to-cook meal packets for the freezer. I have played around with sous-vide cooking as well though I'm not really a regular practitioner of that art.
I bought this for my home kitchen for several reasons:
1) I make a lot of soups and sauces. I have been vacuum sealing with jars and refrigerating them; I want to be able to bag and freeze instead.
2) I wasn't satisfied with how my previous vacuum baggers (from a warehouse club) dealt with meats. I especially didn't like when they sucked meat juice into the machine, and was tired of having to pre-freeze or otherwise play tricks to avoid a mess.
3) I wanted to be able to buy bulk (1000 pack) bags instead of the very expensive textured bags.
4) I wanted to be able to use heavy duty bags (especially for sporting goods that can puncture normal food bags).
5) I'm a big fan of overkill.
The package comes with a couple of "filler plates" (basically cutting boards that fill up part of the vacuum chamber when you are sealing smaller volumes -- by filling the chamber they reduce the amount of air that must be pumped out and cut wear and time), power cord, some maintenance material (heater replacement materials, gasket material, etc), some basic tools, and 100 bags (25 each in 4 sizes), plus of course the machine itself.
The machine isn't nearly as big as amazon says. The shipping box is 24"x19"x19". The machine itself is roughly 13" wide, 19" deep, and 15" tall. It's still very big (and heavy) but it will fit on a standard kitchen counter and, unlike the bag-out vacuum baggers, it doesn't need counter space in front to support the bag.
Once you have it dialed in the VP210 is extremely easy to use. Fill a bag, set it in the chamber (making sure the open end is smooth over the heater bar), lower the lid, and the machine kicks in and runs a vacuum-and-seal cycle. About 40 seconds later the lid pops open to reveal a perfectly sealed bag.
Once you have it dialed in.
Because the VP210 is designed to work with different types of bags, and with different volumes of food (or whatever you are bagging), it leaves a lot of control in the hands of the operator. You can adjust pump run time, sealing heat time, and after-sealing cool-down time. The benefit is that you can tune the machine to work perfectly in your kitchen with your bags. The cost is that you will need to get it set up for your bags. Set the seal heat time too high and it will melt though your bags. Set it too short and your bags won't seal at all.
The instructions point you in the general direction you need to go but aren't comprehensive. For example, the machine has three heat levels available but no guidance is given as to when or why you would adjust the temperature instead of seal time. I have burned through (sometimes literally) a lot of the included bags figuring out how the machine should be adjusted.
So, is it worth it? It's very very expensive (easily 7 times the price of a standard vacuum bagger), takes up a lot of space, is kinda fiddly to dial in, and it weighs about 90 pounds. That's a big pile of negatives to overcome...and I'm not sure how many people could honestly answer, "yes."
A few items to consider:
Because you can bag liquids with this machine, you can easily add marinades to meats. There are tricks to do the same with a standard vacuum machine including freezing marinade ice cubes, using dry rubs, or using a canister or jar to vacuum marinate, but it's handy to be able to put a bit of meat in a bag, squirt some marinade on top, seal the bag, and toss it in the fridge or freezer. This is an even bigger factor if you are trying sous-vide techniques.
Unlike the common household machines, this sealer doesn't have any provisions for evacuating canisters or jars. Just playing around I figured out that you can vacuum seal about nine 8oz canning jars at a pass by putting standard canning lids and rings on them, loading them into the chamber, dialing the seal heat time down to zero, and cycling the machine. This also works with some other containers (I tried an old pipe tobacco tin and it vacuum sealed up tight) but you've got to be able to fit the entire container in the chamber. A standard quart jar won't fit. You can buy hand-held units just for evacuating canisters to cover this gap if you care.
Amazon sells a box of 28 6"x9" foodsaver bags, the sort you need for a bag-out machine, for about 36 cents per bag. You can find 1000 6"x10" vacuum bags for this machine for about 3.5 cents per bag. That difference holds for larger bags as well. However, you've got to use a LOT of bags -- somewhere around 2000 -- to overcome the base price difference of the machines. It's doable -- use one bag a day for five or six years you are there -- but you may never use that many bags.
I think this will work best for most people if they buy 1000 or so standard sized bags, set the machine up to seal those bags, and then just keep using that one type and size bag even if it isn't quite the ideal size. To the extent you can do that, this machine is extremely easy to use and seems to produce very consistent results. If you must use different bags you will spend a lot more time adjusting the machine...time you would not spend with a more home-oriented machine.
I'm really pleased with my VP210. It works as well as I hoped and I expect it to last many years of light but regular use...but I can see where it would be too much for most home kitchens.
Update: I have now owned this unit for about a year and I thought I would add to my initial review with a few lessons learned.
First, the important bit: It's still awesome. I've used it steadily for a year and it has delivered consistently great results, tightly sealed bags with plenty of vacuum, without fail in my home kitchen. I took a vacation up to Alaska late this summer and was tickled to see exactly this unit on the shelves at Costco in Anchorage. Costco is pretty savvy about what they stock so it was good validation to see this unit sold in an area where food preservation can be more than an academic issue.
Second, posting this review has been a real downer for me. I bought a great product, gave it an honest review listing pros and cons, and suddenly shills for competing products start spamming the comments and, in a classic maneuver, accusing everyone else of being shills, insulting me, and in general putting me off of reviewing products for Amazon. Frankly it's depressing to even look at the comments now. Bummer.
The great thing about this machine is that I can leave it "ready to go" under a stainless steel table (picked up from Costco) in my kitchen and seal as I go. I seal 1-3 bags in a "run", and do a "run" every day or two. I've gone through a BUNCH of the small (6x10 if I remember - perfect size for my needs) bags that way but that's OK because they come 1000 to the box.
I have sealed a bunch of bags all in one go but frankly I don't think that's a realistic use most of the time. Not in my kitchen anyway. Most of us go to the grocery store once a week, right? You find a special or sale you might get 20lbs of something. A pound per bag and you've got only 20 bags. To me, if I needed to do much more than that, I would spread it over multiple days. For a home user like me, owning this machine is about quality, not high volume bagging. Quality meaning that a bag of spices sealed with this machine has far less air than when sealed with a Tilla. Quality meaning that I can cook a more succulent turkey dinner by sealing the meat with liquid and spices without having to freeze the liquids or play other tricks. Quality meaning I can count on the machine chugging to life and doing a great job every time I lower the lid. Can it seal 100 bags in an hour? Who cares? I mean honestly? Do you need to seal 100 bags? It'll still do a better job than any other machine I've used, but how often are you actually going to need to do that?
This is a quality machine that stretches the absolute outer limit, in my opinion, of what a home kitchen needs or what a home cook should want. For me it has gone through a year of regular service, expanded my sous vide repertoire immensely (seriously, ability to add liquids, c'est magnifique!), sealed spices, meats, and everything else I've needed to seal, and has done it without a single glitch or hiccup. However, it's HUGE. It's heavy. I think my microwave has it beat as the largest freestanding appliance in my kitchen but it certainly wins the "heaviest" prize. It's also expensive, more expensive now than when I got mine. All of that said, I'm extremely happy with my purchase and would do it again in a heartbeat.
Thumbs up again.
