Everyone who shops at quality food stores is by now familiar with the preservative virtues of a vacuum sealer.

Whether it’s for keeping packaged food fresh for weeks in your home refrigerator, or freezer burn-free for months in the deep freeze, an at-home vacuum sealer is a wise investment.

Those of us who cook sous-vide also understand how indispensable it is when preparing foodstuffs for the hot-water bath.  And for making a totally addictive compressed watermelon salad. Not to mention how a vacuum-pressure treatment can handily compress a 24-hour marinating cycle into 20 minutes. But for all that, the home consumer in need has long been confronted with a stark choice: pay $3000 to $4000 for the real, restaurant-quality item or live in frustration with the cheap, suction-based, home-issue knockoff.

No longer. This new, high-quality and very reasonably priced home-use chamber vacuum-sealer does everything you need with both dry food and wet—with no maintenance required (thanks to a dry-piston pump in place of the customary oil lubrication).

PolyScience 300 Series Chamber Vacuum Sealer is $1,375 at Testek.ca, or at polyscienceculinary.com