I’m a single dad so very frequently I wil buy meat at the grocery store with the intention of making a nice meal for me and my daughter but, as alot of people do, it’s easier to make PBJ and chips than it is to make tacos or spaghetti and what not.
This leads to meats, mostly ground beef, sitting in my freezer for up to 2 months.
How long is this meat good for? I have a package of chicken drumsticks in the freezer that say “Use or freeze by Sep 06”. I don’t want to throw them out if they are not good but I don’t want to poison me and my kid either.
Ground beef is the biggest offender. I’ll buy 3 things of GB and use 1 or two in a grocery cycle and then the third one will sit for a long time, getting freezer burn in the process, and then I throw it out. How long is GB good for once it’s frozen?
How does long term freezing affect the taste of the meat? Sometimes I will eat a steak that has been in the freezer for a month or so and it will taste “old” or something. Hard to explain.
Also, if I thaw out GB in the fridge, then don’t use it when I expect to (which happens alot) can I refreeze without degrading the quality or taste of the meat? How many times can I refreeze meat?
I’m sure these are pretty dumb questions but I’m trying here. Lol.
I am not an expert. My experience comes from some years back, when my parents bought an entire lamb from a friends who’s an organic farmer. His advice was this. For small pieces of meat, freezer life is nearly indefinite; they’ll last six months without ill effect. For pieces of two pounds or more, preservation of the inside may not be perfect, so you should use a deep freeze if you’re planning to keep them for more than a month. For pieces of ten pounds or more, you need to put them in the deep freeze immediately.
Not dumb questions at all. The thing to remember is that long-term freezing won’t make meat “bad”, but like you noticed, you’ll lose flavor.
I’ve heard six months as a maximum for meat in a freezer. Got that from a food/nutrition website. Seems a bit too long to me.
This is for meat that’s been well-packaged, wrapped in plastic and then in freezer paper. If it’s in a styrofoam tray with a thin plastic wrap, it probably wouldn’t be tasty for more than a couple of weeks in the freezer.
You’re not supposed to re-freeze meat, ever.
Your Sept. 6 chicken should be okay, if you froze it when you brought it home. I wouldn’t wait much longer though.
I think freezing is over-rated as a method of preservation but I don’t have an alternative. We try to use everything in the freezer within a month.
Depends on what you mean by “good”. If you’re talking about microbial spoilage, you’re safe pretty much indefinitely as long as it stays frozen. If you’re talking about the taste and texture of the meat, that’ll depend on storage conditions, your freezer, etc, etc.
But from a purely food safety standpoint, well, remember a while back when a mammoth carcass was found buried in the permafrost, and one of the scientists thawed out a bit of the meat and fed it to his dogs? I’d feel comfortable eating that meat myself. Cooked, preferably…
Some of the GB I buy has plastic wrap directly on the meat, but some is kind of “air packed” if you know what I mean. The air packed stuff gets freezer burn pretty bad if I don’t use it in a few weeks.
Here’s a guide from the FDA. Freezer burn won’t kill you, but it’s going to decrease the taste, and the texture might be a little off. I’ve found that chicken freezes really well, ground beef almost as well, but I haven’t had as good as luck with steaks or chops.
Freezer burn is pretty specific. Water sublimates, this leads to food that is very dry, The “freezer burn” is the whitish edges on desicated frozen foods. I doubt they are a health hazard but (from experience) they taste like crap.
