Art,
Sounds interesting, but have a couple questions, and then some comments on how long we keep meat:
What brand of bags are you using in the chamber vac? We buy 1100-foot rolls of 18" wide freezer paper, and process an average of 7 animals a year, ranging in size from "eater" pigs and pronghorn to nilgai, elk and moose. The average cost for paper is around $3 per animal, so am wondering how the bags you use compare in cost.
We have the roll set up in a dispenser/cutter (that as I recall cost around $20, though that was a number of years ago) and have a pretty fast system worked out. With two of us working, we can butcher and wrap a mature northern buck deer in about two hours, cut into steaks, roasts, stew, backstraps, filets and burger. A nilgai, elk or moose takes 4-8 hours, depending on the size of the animal. Am wondering how your system compares timewise.
Freezer burn has never been a problem. For everyday meat we have two non-frost-free 15-cubic-foot chest freezers, one next to the kitchen and the other in the basement, and Eileen has a 15cf upright (again non-frost-free) for her cookbook projects, so she can access them more easily.
We empty and defrost all three each year just before hunting season, then inventory the meat and divide it between the kitchen and upright freezers, a process that takes a couple of hours.
The empty chest freezer in the basement gets filled during hunting season as a "savings account." With very few exceptions, we don't eat any of that meat until the following year.
The kitchen chest freezer gets filled with the oldest packages, with meat from last year's hunting season on the bottom and older packages on top. Most of meat we're eating right is from 2012 and 2013, including several packages we cooked last week while my brother was visiting, and none have been freezer-burned. That's been our experience for many years now.
John
We ran with butcher paper and heavy freezer wrap for years. First the clear plastic and then the butcher wrap which is folded around the package, not just wrapped like butchers do it. I still do it that way when saving whole deer hams and such.
The bags are much more expensive, but because we run with one, two, or three vac packers depending on the size of the job, it gets done faster than you can wrap carefully.
Now I have access to a packer that will easily vac seal an entire king salmon!
We regularly have meat that is not eaten in a year or two, but generally use last years meat for sausage or burger.
Like anything else the abuse packages get in the freezer is critical to how well meat lasts. With the burger packages we flatten and stack them in proper size boxes to be extremely efficient in space utilization. To speed freezing I will stack short piles to freeze and then stack together with a new package between to mate the packages perfectly.
Bulk packed sausage gets the same treatment.
Extremely rapid thawing is another benefit...
