Some time ago I inherited a house from an aunt who lived out in the country. I was surprised how much food she had stashed away: canned goods, dry goods, and two freezers full of food. Then I started to look at the dates on some of this stuff and it began to make sense (well, sorta); my aunt must have bought into the pre-Y2K panic and stashed away all this food in anticipation of the apocalypse that never came.
So anyway, yesterday I thawed, cooked and ate (with no ill effects) some bacon that had been in my aunt’s freezer since 1999. (Going on eight years!) It was delicious! Best bacon I’ve had in a while, as a matter of fact.
Now it’s no mastodon steak, but I’m quite certain that’s the oldest food I’ve ever tried (knowingly, anyway).
Fellow dopers, have you ever eaten any ancient frozen foods? What’s your record? Tell us your tale.
Back when I was a kid, my mom had a friend who worked for a company that made raisins, and he gave us several boxes. We weren’t big on using them as snacks, so my mom dated and froze some of the boxes. She put the last of them into the some cookies she served at Christmas last month. The box was dated Summer of '92. So we ate fourteen year old raisins. They tasted fine, but eww.
This isn’t frozen foods, but I just made some brownies with some cocoa powder pushing the four or five year mark. My mom, for reasons unknown, bought something like a gallon and a half of cocoa powder around the time I graduated from high school. There’s about three cups of it left, sealed in a huge glass jar in the pantry.
The brownies were delicious, and gone by noon the next day. I’m about to make some more.