A couple of weeks ago I bought a fair amount of smoked salmon which I was looking forward to eating Ikea-style with a nice mustard-dill sauce. I put it in the freezer. Unfortunately, the other day, I was moving stuff around in the freezer and took out the salmon for a moment. Which became 24 hours…
I guess I need to throw it away? In case it is relevant, the salmon was smoked (I said that already, I know), vacuum packed, and when I took it out, it came from the extra freezer in the garage (ambient temperature probably 57F).
Advice appreciated (not fast, but pretty soon, thanks!)
It should be okay if it was frozen like a brick when you took it out. It’s smoked and vacuum-packed, so all it really did was thaw.
thanks.
I should clarify that the salmon is not thick but rather flat and only about a quarter of an inch thick. It’s the sort you would have with crackers and mustard sauce.
It is safe to say that it would have thawed quickly and was at unsafe temperatures for at least 24 hours. The question I guess is whether the vacuum packing and smoking would have protected it.
At the store it was in the refrigerated sector and not at room temperature
Smoked foods remain edible for a long time, especially if they’re sealed. I doubt 24 h at room temperature is enough to contaminate it.
Open the package and leave the fish on the kitchen counter overnight, and you might have a problem. But not now.
I’d be much more concerned about eating cold pizza from the box that was left on the counter overnight, and people do that all the time. If the package was vacuum-sealed you shouldn’t have anything to worry about.
IANAFSE (I am not a food safety expert) but hell yeah, I’d eat it. I’d start by eating a not-too-generous amount and see if it caused any gastric distress. If not, I’d try to eat the rest of it within a day or two. And I wouldn’t give any to unsuspecting guests.
What, no SALMON MOUSSE?? 
Yeah, I’d eat that no problem. I mean, I do my own smoked salmon on occasion and that requires it to be packed in salt for a few days in the fridge then it spends about 16 hours outdoors in the smoker which doesn’t get all that hot so if it doesn’t go bad during all that it’s not likely to have a problem with sitting out after being vacuum packed.
Actually I just remembered a rule of thumb I sometimes use for such situations: would I eat it if it were a packed lunch? For example: suppose I packed a smoked salmon portion as part of a brown-bag lunch, say at 7am, took it to the office, and then didn’t get around to eating lunch until 3 or 4 in the afternoon. Would I hesitate about eating it? Not at all (unless it had been sitting in a hot car all day). This strikes me as a similar situation, time and temp-wise.
What my wife would do is make lox soup. It is made with some onions, a white fish (or use a fish stock), potatoes, and milk. The point is that it would be cooked for long enough to destroy any harmful bacteria or botulin toxin. And it is delicious. Leftover soup can now be safely frozen.
I am sure actual recipes can be found online.
I don’t know that re-boiling legitimately spoiled food can save it.
That being said, I also don’t think the O.P.'s fish is spoiled in the first place. Smoking & salting meat was developed to preserve it … that PLUS the fact that it was still vacuum sealed?
Psh. { waves hand dismissively } I’d eat it.
Just to be clear: A high enough heat applied for a long enough time generally kills bacteria but doesn’t destroy most toxins that bacteria have created. (It does break down botulism, interestingly, so you are correct about that.) So if the food had been spoiling for a while and the bacteria had been emitting their waste products, just heating the food wouldn’t help - the bacteria themselves would be dead but you could still get sick from the toxins the bacteria had already emitted.
Of course in this particular case, the bacteria, if any, would have hardly had a chance to multiply, between the salmon starting out frozen, not getting particularly warm even after thawing, and the smoking and the salt. So I agree with you and everyone else that the fish should be edible; I just think it’s important not to leave the impression that any spoiling food can be rendered edible by boiling.
For smoked salmon, there’s a major fork in the road: cold vs hot smoked. The technicalities are debated but the best definition I’ve seen is if there’s any transparency. Hot smoked will be completely opaque.
And cold smoked is what I think OP has it it is a lot more perishable. But I’d still eat it myself.
Thank you. Ignorance fought.
In the 1997 Montreal ice storm our freezer thawed in the week without power. But we took all the meat and made an enormous stew, froze much of it and gradually ate it all. I expect that long-frozen meat was essentially sterile and, in sealed containers inside a freezer would not go bad anyway. At all events, we survived.
I’m not a microbiologist (so don’t rely on anything I say), but it’s my understanding that a lot of bacteria can survive long periods of freezing - their activity is essentially halted while the food is frozen, which is why it’s generally safe to consume food that’s been frozen for years (despite quality degradation due to enzymes breaking down). However, as soon as the food is thawed the bacteria will “wake up” and the clock starts ticking again on food spoiling.
Assuming the meat from the freezer didn’t sit at room temperature for a day or more, I’d do exactly what you did. The food was presumably wrapped, so while it wouldn’t have turned sterile from freezing, it wouldn’t be picking up new bacteria from surfaces or air, and it would have stayed frozen/remained cold for a long time after the power stopped.