I will be making an international journey in a week or so, and the people I’m visiting have requested that I cook them some fish curry and lamb curry (because I’m such a faaaabulous chef. Ahem.). Ordinarily, this wouldn’t be a problem because I could just go to their house and do the cooking. Thing is, the place they’ve moved to is primarily vegetarian and buying meat or seafood there is an extremely iffy thing. No guarantee of availability, let alone of freshness. Consequently, I’m pondering making the stuff here and transporting it to them frozen. (Yes, it is complicated. Bear with me.)
My questions are:
[ol]
[li] Can a meaty/fishy curry survive a 13-hour journey in a frozen state? It’s bound to start thawing - would it go bad? I don’t want to kill my hosts![/li][li] How much flavour would it lose from the freezing/thawing process?[/li][li] Would any fats in the meat congeal during freezing? Because it would be somewhat gross to thaw the stuff and have globs of fat floating on top. Ick.[/li][li] If I cook everything about 2 days in advance and freeze it, is that okay?[/li][li] Assuming the lack of a microwave and ordinary oven, how precisely should I thaw it? Put the container in a pot of boiling water?[/li][li] Is there a more sensible way to transport the stuff that I am not considering? (E.g.: “Don’t bother freezing it, you goof. The spices will definitely keep the curry from going bad for half a day even if it is at room temperature.”)[/li][/ol]
It does sound like I’m making a mountain out of a molehill, but this is important in one of those “you have to be there” kind of ways.
If you are only talking about a day or two, you don’t need to freeze it, you can just refrigerate it. You will need some kind of Igloo (or similar) cooler for the journey.
If you do freeze it, you can immerse it in cold water to thaw it (I’m assuming you have it in a sealed container, so that water doesn’t get into it). Once its partially thawed, you can transfer it to a saucepan to be properly heated.
Prepare to have it confiscated at customs. I happen to know that there is NO bringing of meat into the US for example. Not even sealed in the package storebought meats [hey, I live these little german sausages, and speck that is difficult and expensive to get in the US and it was confiscated at customs in Boston=(] Homemade meat products will probably be against the import laws pretty much everywhere…
Are you flying? Are you flying direct? It’s quite cold in the hold of an airplane, so a frozen container packed into a checked suitcase will most likely still be frozen when you arrive. I’ve transported leftover Christmas dinner back home from back home (you know, to where I live now, from where my family home is) this way on several occasions and the frozen dishes have never been anything but rock hard when I arrived, even on occasions when I’ve had layovers and such, though, obviously the fact that the layovers occur in Canada in December helps on that score.
But as others have said, whether you can safely transport it or not may not be relevent, because it’s more than likely that you can’t legally transport.