Fridge burn?

[cjsmith]

Put a pound of ground beef in a self-defrost freezer and pretty soon it'll be brown around the edges.

Put it in the fridge and sooner or later you'll see a similar brown. I don't think my fridge crosses the freezing point, not since we lost an expensive bottle of insulin to that very thing and messed with the thermostat a tad. Is the blood simply draining out of the tissue? What's going on there?

Comments

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Thanks! If that tint isn't spoilage, how can I best determine when it *is* spoiling? Scent?

[klwalton.livejournal.com]

Pretty much. I go by the rule that once I thaw ground beef, I use it within three days or it gets tossed. If I buy it and put it in the refrigerator, three days past sell-by date is my cut off. Ground meat is more likely to give you problems than whole pieces of meat - all that surface area :).

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Three days, hrm? Okay. I can go by that rule.

I find thawing is a royal pain in the patootie. Do you thaw in the fridge, in the microwave, in some kind of water bath, ...?

[klwalton.livejournal.com]

*If* I think about it ahead of time, I thaw in the refrigerator. Otherwise I just leave it out on the counter in the morning. Haven't died yet :).

On the other hand, if I'm using it in something like spaghetti sauce where I want to brown it and break it up, I'll throw it in the pan still frozen, and thaw and cook at the same time :).

I find a water bath can be a problem with ground meat, because the water *will* get in the meat and effectively soak all the juices out of it.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

That's how we always did it when I was a kid, too: on the counter in the morning. That worked until we got a dog tall enough to reach!

So if ground beef = 3 days, how about a chunk of roast or something? Same rule, or longer?

Thanks!

[klwalton.livejournal.com]

I rarely keep anything in the refrigerator longer than a day or two, just because I have a chest freezer. But I've been known to keep a roast or a steak in their for up to five or six days. If I buy a turkey within a week of cooking it, I keep it in the coldest part of the refrigerator rather than freeze then thaw. Chicken I'm more careful with, and fish gets cooked the day I buy it or, at most, the day after.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I wind up keeping raw ingredients in the fridge whenever I get interrupted after the grocery run. I like to divide up the big economy packs of meat into reasonable sizes before freezing, chop the onion and the celery into ziplocs for future soup making, that sort of thing. If I can't do it when I arrive home, I may not have free time again for days. It's frustrating to lose stuff that way!

YAY NO FISH FOR ME EVER muahahaha! ;-)

[inflectionpoint.livejournal.com]

Be careful with ground meats. Unless you grind it yourself or see the butcher do it, you may be eating meat that's got a lot of bits and pieces of rather unattractive things in it. If it's coming from factory farmed meat that went through an industrial plant, there's a strong chance that there are bits of poop and other cow by products in it. Grinding will mix it all up together, and while most of us have enough of an immune system to not really care about these things, if you are elderly, or immune compromised, or just sorta sickly, it can be very bad for you.

Cook it thouroughly, and follow the usual food safety rules. I still eat meat, and I still eat ground meat, but I'm much more careful than I used to be, after learning more about Industrial Meat.

Friend of mine buys a half cow a year from a rancher, and grinds it herself. I wish I had enough meat eaters in my life and a big enough freezer to make that worth doing. I also wish I could buy a lamb and grind it myself. I'd be a Very Happy Girl, even if tired and covered in blood.