Howdy! I’m hoping the good folks at SMDB can help me settle an argument with the missus:
We just bought some goregous steaks from Sam’s Club that we plan to grill up for her dad this Father’s Day. They’re nice, big steaks that cost a fair amount and she’s worried about how to store them.
She says that we should freeze them. I say that we shouldn’t freeze them and that to do so will affect the taste. She thinks they might be rank by then, but the “Sell By” date on the package is June 20th (coincidentally, the same day we’re gonna grill them) so I say it’s OK to keep them in the bottom of the fridge.
I’ve tried using my Powers of Alton Brown on her, explaining about ice crystals and such, but she won’t listen.
As the 20th is only three days from now, I’d say that the refrigerator is your best bet, as long as the temperature is between about 35-40 degrees F. Freezing is ok for the long haul, but you lose some texture, and once you’ve frozen them and defrosted, you can’t freeze them again without making them pretty nasty. Beef keeps well in the fridge for ~5 days, IME.
It’s actually quite impressive how long one can store meat without having to resort to freezing. There has been a revolution in meat shipping in the last decades, where ‘chilled’ meat can now be shipped around the globe without actually being frozen.
What they do is to cool down the meat quickly to a temperature very close to freezing (less than 1[sup]o[/sup]C), and by maintaining very good hygiene. By also modifying the atmosphere, meat can be stored for about 100days.
(That’s how you can get non-frozen Australian lamb in Europe.)
Your fridge won’t keep quite that low temperature, and depending on how the beef was butchered, it may be too contaminated, but it should by all means last a couple of days in the fridge. (And as QED points out, the texture does suffer from freezing - especially repeated freezing.)
(Sidenote: We have all been told thousands of times never to re-freeze thawed food. I can see that the texture sufferes from the formation of larger ice-crystals, and that in some cases contamination can spread more easily into the bulk of the material, but is that really such a hard and fast rule? And why has it been drummed into us with such intensity? (My MIL refuses to freeze food that was cooked from frozen ingredients, something that I cannot get my head around.)
Provided the meat has not been allowed to warm up significantly (that is, you got it home before it was anywhere near room temperature), I’d trust it for five days in the fridge. It can probably go even longer than that in many cases, I’m just being cautious.
Note also that fish can not be kept that long in a home fridge, in my experience.
The secret to freezing food without adverse effects is to freeze it QUICKLY. This could be a problem with thick steaks.
For steaks, chicken breasts, etc. I wrap each individually, then put them in the freezer wtih some separation between them. This seems to work well. Putting meat in a stack, though, doesn’t because the meat on the outer edge of the stack acts as insulation and slows down the freezing in the middle of the pile.
You CAN refreeze that which has been previously frozen - you’re not going to drop dead or anything. It will affect the texture (even more so than the taste). Generally, that means the stewpot in my house.
Won’t freeze something cooked made from frozen food? How strange - I mean, cooking changes things far more than freezing does. Now, cook -> freeze -> refreeze maybe not so good an idea… but again, it’s the texture/taste that’s affected. It doesn’t suddenly turn into poison.
DISCLAIMER - need clarification from someone with Health & Safety experience
I have heard that you can age beef at room temperature for many days, and that this will have a positive effect on the tenderness of the meat.
In fact someone I spoke to mentioned that the most succulent steak they had ever eaten was one that they had been aged (ie left out) for about 20 days. He cut off all of the black bits, and the remainder simply melt in the mouth.
I presume this will depend upon how fresh the steak was to start with, if it was previously refridgerated or indeed already aged before purchase…
anyway… getting hungry thinking about this…
This is true. AFAIK, most beef is aged in one way or another, but the best steaks are definitely dry aged.
You can’t age a single steak; to age properly the meat needs a protective layer of fat around it. Better to buy one that has been properly aged. You can buy a large cut of meat with good characteristics for aging and age it at home, but I would recommend getting some more information before attempting this, you don’t want to ruin several pounds of meat or get sick.
(I have no professional qualifications in this area, but that won’t stop me from thinking out loud.)
It’s true that most meat becomes more tender by ageing, as the pH goes down and the collagen starts to dissolve. However, this has to be done under fairly controlled circumstances to ensure that there’s no bacterial contamination. It’s normally done at low temperature, as the lower temperature impacts the bacterial growth much more than the chemical decomposition.
If you just leave a steak on your kitchen counter my guess is that it will fairly quickly be contaminated, and the local bacteria will have a field day. If you are lucky, they’re fairly benign, and might even help by breaking down some of the connective tissue. If you’re less lucky however, you get a colony of e. coli, or something similar. Most often they won’t kill you (our digestive system is actually quite powerfull against these little buggers), but I think you’d be taking a stupid risk.