What is thawing ?
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Thawing is heating an object up enough so that a material trapped within it can melt or vaporize without the object itself being damaged. Most commonly it refers to frozen water trapped inside of food, but it can mean any object permeated by a frozen substance where the same process is taking place; for example laboratory samples stored in liquid nitrogen are “thawed” by letting the sample reach a high enough temperature that the nitrogen returns to a gaseous state.
When you let something icy become not icy. Like when you leave mince that’s been in the freezer out to defrost. In that case the mince is thawing
Stuff becomes ice because it loses so much heat energy its particles stop moving freely and start to form bonds strong enough to make the matter solid. This usually forms some kind of crystalline structure based on the shape of the particles involved.
If you start applying heat energy to that frozen matter, the particles start trying to move again. Eventually they start breaking the bonds they formed when the matter lost heat energy. That starts to break the crystalline structure and the matter starts to take on its liquid properties again.
“Thawing” is the process of heating something frozen to turn it back into liquid. I know we talk about thawing solid stuff like meat, but in reality what’s happened there is there was moisture in the meat and we froze the moisture. The proteins that formed the meat didn’t really get frozen! (This is how freezer burn can happen or why places advertise “never frozen” meat, the process of that moisture freezing can do damage to the meat depending on how fast it happens. Freezing, thawing, and re-freezing stuff does more damage to it.) You can’t really freeze stuff with low or no moisture like crackers or jerky. They’ll get cold, but they don’t have moisture to turn to ice! (But their lack of moisture is also part of why those things have a longer shelf life!)
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