How long is hard salami (Hot Spanish) safe to eat after its expiry date?
I bought a nice 250 gram salami last week and after eating half of it noticed the Use By sticker. It expired in May 2006.
It still tasted good and I didn’t get sick or die. Was I just lucky?
If it tastes good and you don’t get sick it’s perfectly OK. Use by or best before dates does not necessarily mean that the item for some mysterious reason goes bad over night.
Where the hell did you buy it?
I am concerned that although I didn’t get sick someone else who eats one might. I don’t get sick from eating dodgy food very easily.
The supermarket that I bought it from has many more and they all have the 2006 use by date. I would tell them about it but I am in Korea and don’t speak any Korean at all.
E-Mart in Suwon, South Korea.
What, whole pieces? They get the sticker due to government regulations, it officially counts as “raw meat.” If it had gone bad you would have noticed (having the general consistency of a concrete wall doesn’t count as “gone bad”).
Many of those dried meats used to be considered “too raw to be sold” if they were less than one year old; it wasn’t unusual to get pieces that were 5yo or so. Now selling a 5yo ham or salchichón is against the law but many people who make them at home still won’t offer anything below 2yo to visitors (legally unsellable).
Assure me that I’m not the only one who expected the subject line to be followed by “rock bands”…
Smell and taste are not always reliable indicators of whether food is safe to eat, because some of the pathogens that make spoiled food dangerous aren’t particularly smelly, and some that are smelly aren’t necessarily dangerous.
But that’s more relevant to fresh foods, especially fresh foods cut into pieces.
For salami that is whole, dry and salty, the end of shelf life is usually caused by rancidity of fats, or drying to unpalatable bone-hardness, so in these cases, if it seems good, it probably still is.
Also, the use by date on these sorts of products is more to do with stock rotation than expiry.
A couple weeks ago I bought a Summer sausage at the Grocery store. When I sliced it, the slice it was approximately half normal redish Summer sausage and half a sickly looking grey. I assumed it was porbably a leak in the package, and oxidation related. I debated for about 5 minutes whether I should just eat it, only eat the red part, or through the whole thing out. IO decided that if I did eat it I would wonder if I would get sick, and the total utility of the situation pushed toward throwing it out. I don’t know why but I never thought to check for an expiry date.
Anybody with a Phd in Summer sausage know about it turning grey? In case it happens again.
That’s good to know. Thanks.
Mangetout, could you please expand on this- the use by date and stock rotation?
I am certain that if you took it back to the store you purchaced it at and showed it to the manager, he would give you a new sausage, give you your money back or very possibly both give you a refund and a free new sausage.
Even if you dont have a receipt, they will replace it, with no questions asked----Grocery stores are always willing to work with customers who have an issue with possibly spoiled food.
Properly cured ham, chorizo and salchichón can last foreeeeeever (specially if they’re not open). Spanish law currently requires all foodstuffs to be assigned a use-by date (not a “produced on” date); this date isn’t really linked to the time when the food in question is expected to turn bad (in the words of a cannery owner, “if a can is bad, it’s bad on day one, and if it’s not it’s not”), but to the legal requirement which basically was pulled out of the left elbow of a guy with a law degree.
The use-by date can be used to run “first in, first out”-type stock rotation schemes (“first expired out” is the specific one); since many of these products don’t have their production date listed, you can’t use that one.
One of the reasons the production date is not listed is - how do you determine it? Is it the day the pig was killed, the day the leg was hung up to dry or the casing stuffed, the day it was determined to be properly cured? A lot of brands are selling under-cured products, with the reasoning that “it’s more tender:” those brands definitely can’t use the third day, and if they listed the other two, it would scream “this so-called cured meat isn’t anywhere near cured.”
Yes, what Nava said. Ideally, stock turnover in a store for very long-dated goods should easily be brisk enough that nothing ever goes out of date, but in order to make sure that happens, the store needs to make sure that new stock is placed behind old, so the expiry date is still useful to them.
This is a mom and pop grocery store in South Korea. All their sausages lare labeled as expired in 2006. Not quite the same as your local Kroger.
Isn’t there someone on this board who speaks Korean, that could give this guy a note he could print out and hand to the manager?
HazelNutCoffee is Korean and I think it’s one of the languages Mr. Moto speaks.
MPB in Salt Lake was responding to a different question from someone other than the OP
And there was me worrying about some Austrian sausage that’s been sitting on the back shelf of my refrigerator since March this year. I’d better tuck in.
Is it dry sausage, though? The ones we were talking about are dry.