I have a tendency to be sensitive about stale chips (I’m putting it mildly and being kind) and the way a lot of folks try to seal their chip bags, so I decided to post a tutorial that will help anyone interested in sealing a half-full bag of chips (of any kind) to keep their chips as fresh as possible.
- First, look at your open bag and get an idea on how full it is and where the center of the bag is (there may be a center stripe on the bag such as this one. There are also some creases on this bag because it has been sealed before, but ignore those for now.
2. Now, grasp the top of the bag right in the middle.
3. Next, find a point on the right side about the same distance down as the measure from the center to the side (that will be about a 45 degree diagonal, but it looks a little steeper in this view), and bend that 45 degree corner down (away from you in this view). Crease it in that position to make it stay.
4. Do the same thing on the other side
(this one looks a lot more like 45 degrees).
5. Now let’s turn the bag around so you can see the result of what we have been doing and why it is going to make a good seal.
As you can now see, we have aligned the open edge (what was the extreme top) of the bag into a single line. Right now we could seal the bag with a single long clamp below my thumb. But such a ‘clamp’ is not very available or strong. So we are going to make that line shorter to make it easier to seal with a shorter clamp.
6. Fold the point (under my thumb in the above photo) of the folded bag down half of the way to the folded edge so that the point is in line with the folded edge.
7. Fold it again about half way down (the weird gray blob on the left is me trying to obscure the brand name on the bag).
8. Finally, put your clip on the folded bag (there’s that blob again). Your bag is now fairly well sealed. If you are using a binder clip like the one I used, you can also fold the ‘levers’ down to add some extra (slight) pressure and further improve the seal. The reason it is so well sealed is because we have collected all the open end of the bag into one small area where we can clamp it in one small space.
