DIY MREs (sorta)

[Black Dog]

I just found this pretty cool post on another forum. The guy shows how he makes his own vacu-packed meal rations, which I think would be a pretty good addition to your chow box in your truck. The reason I found this is because I got a food saver for my birthday a few months ago and think it is the coolest thing in the world and was searching this site. The only thing is that they aren't really Meals Ready to Eat in the same capacity as a real MRE. Real MREs you can just open it up and chow down, but these there is some prep required like a heat source or boiling water. Another thing he said is to use a pin to poke a hole in packets of dry food. If not, it will puff up inside the vacuumed environment and use more space, and since it is in a vacuum spoilage won't be a problem. Its a pretty cool idea he had, I might try and whip up a few this weekend.

[rusty_tlc]

Your link is busticated.


I vac seal all kinds of stuff besides food.


When I get a spare set of Birfields for the FJ60 I plan to grease them up, wrap them in plastic and vac seal them before they go into the spares box.

[Black Dog]

The link is good now, I went back to that forum yesterday afternoon and the whole site was down but it looks like they got it fixed.

My wife got me a small food saver for by birthday last November and I've just recently been getting into using it, so much so in fact that I'm all out of the rolls of plastic material. But I love that little thing though, its amazing how just sucking out the air keeps things fresh. I bought a small flat iron steak and sealed it up as soon as I got home. Normally when I leave them in the store packaging they start turning brown after about 3 or 4 days in the fridge, but it was still bright red and had no weird odors or anything. In fact it was actually a really good steak, I think if I would have left if for a little while longer it would have basically wet aged inside there and just gotten better after a while.

I also sealed up about 50 .22 caliber bullets just for fun, and a wool hat (don't ask why, I was just bored).

I also found something interesting that might be some help to other food vacu-packer owners. The unit I have uses the 11 inch rolls, and I thought it was wasteful to use that wide of a sack for something small so I did an experiment. I sealed the end of the roll just like normal, then cut the sack to my desired length. Then I made another cut perpendicular to the first cut. This left me with 2 sacks, but have the factory welded seam and the melted seal I created. I sealed the sack parallel to the factory weld, filled my new mini sack and sucked and sealed like normal only smaller. So far my tests and experiments are showing that this works perfectly with no leaks or anything. I packed up a bunch of single servings of rice and couscous for back packing this summer and spring.

So technically, if you've got something long and tubular shaped like a bratwurst or something, you could make those smaller sacks, only cut 3 out of the original instead of 2 (or maybe even 4, but that would be pretty narrow) and individually seal them. Really, as long as the little zig zag lines on the food saver bag are perpendicular to the vacuum chamber so that it can suck air out, it doesn't matter how large or small your sack is.

[Black Dog]

Dangit, I just tried to go back to that forum thinking it was fixed but obviously it isn't.....again. Seriously, just a couple minutes ago that link worked and I even went to other threads on the site. Ugh.

[off-roader]

Maybe you should just copy and paste what's on his post to here?

[Black Dog]

Its a long post with some large pictures. Their site is having problems because it worked yesterday morning, then quit afternoon, then worked briefly this morning and is not working again still right now.

Basically what the guy did was he went out and bought stuff like individually packaged servings of heat-and-eat mac & cheese and spam and that kind of stuff that has a long shelf like and needs no refridgeration, then found a place called minimus.biz on the internet that sells little ketchup and mustard packets and the cute little bottles of tobasco and that kind of stuff to include. He made a variety of different meals, then sealed them up in his food sealer. He made a couple dozen of them for only $75, whereas mass produced MRE's cost quite a bit more, and it is a crap shoot what you get in them. In his he can custom make them with only foods he knows he would actually want to eat, and since a couple people in his family are diabetic he could make his custom MREs safe for them to eat too by checking the ingedients of the foods he was packing and included splenda instead of real sugar and that sort of thing.

[mudbutt]

Your link is busticated.

I don't think it's the link......

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[Black Dog]

Their site is the cause of the problems, which is kind of a bummer because there are 10s of thousands of people who are active on the boards there, so that means 10s of thousands of disgruntled subscribers with guns and stock piles of ammo and home made and mass produced MREs and who can start fires by rubbing two sticks together and stuff.

[rynosurf]

There is a lot of good info on Survivalist Boards, if I'm not here checking stuff out I'm usually over there.

[Black Dog]

As of right now, that forum is back up so we'll see if it stays that way.