THE_COW_IS_OK

I am looking for ways to best preserve garden fuits, vegetables, and forest truffles. After several research, I found that ideally, such food are best preserved using freeze drying methods. Something out of reach to most home users. The second best options is flash freezing with liquid nitrogen to keep water crystals smalls. Liquid nitrogen is pretty expensive in my country but this gave me several idea. One way to speed up freezing is using liquid conduction(much faster then air conduction or convection) by vacuum sealing food in plastic bags and immersing then in glycol bath kept in the home freezer. Now, I can have access to lab freezer that reach -45C and even -80C that allow glycol at very low temp and will speed things faster. What do you guys think? Will I get similar performance to Liquid nitrogen? Samer.

My VP112 have arrived. I didn't have an edge sealer but my trick was to use a glass jar with lid loosely placed. place both inside a bag and vac seal everything. It came out perfect. My next step was making abnormally fluffy meringue. I placed a meringue scoop inside the jar. sealed it @200MB and placed it inside my sous-vide bath @85C for 2 hours. Results were amazingly fluffy meringue. No need for vacuum oven Anyways. I like the VP112. The main downside is it gets only up till 28.1"hg. IF I had to redo it again, I would have bought the next step up with oil pump capable of 29.5"hg VP215. (from 28.1->29.5 is like 4 times more vacuum strength!)

I just read a recipe from HB that demand placing a chocolate & meringue foam in a vacuum set @250MilliBar for 15min. Can the VacMaster VP112 hold a vacuum for that long? Can we manually turn off the vacuum once it reach the correct level? IF not , I might look for the the upper range VacMaster model (unless none of the vacmaser handle such tasks) Sam.

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Animals living on pasture is scarce over here and my only source for organic grass fed beef seems to be import. Most markets carries south american meat(Brazilian and argentinian) with some sort of certification of origin. I read the labels and there are no details regarding the feed and raising environment. My only indication is the quantity of marbling in specific cuts but this is in no way a conclusive approach. Anyone living in lebanon managed to find such products? I also produce a lot of cheeses and am in constant look for raw milk. I found some sources in bekaa region but the diary cattle feed almost exclusivle on fermented wheat plants, hays, and grains. Never green!