why is it bad to refreeze meat after thawing it?
In: 170
The cells in meat are mainly water. When water freezes it turns to ice, and those ice crystals expand, bursting open the cell. If you freeze meat just once, the damage isn’t so bad that you notice… *too much*.
Now, freeze the meat again, and you really start to notice the difference. Many more cells have burst open from the freezing process and the meat’s texture becomes noticeably “mushier” and the taste has changed as well.
And for whoever explains it, does your answer also apply to vacuum sealed meat? Always wondered
As the meat reaches room temperature, it hits the optimum levels for bacteria to grow and reproduce on the food. The ceiling is around 78c, get your food hotter than that and it kills the majority of bacteria on it. However, if you dont cool it quickly and safely enough, I.e. if you leave some food out for a couple of hours and then fridge or freeze it, you’ll have given the bacteria that time to grow and reproduce and then as the food begins the chill, that bacteria then becomes dormant. When you then go to eat the food again, it warms up and the bacteria begins to “wake up” again.
The danger zone is room temperature, its prime breeding conditions for bacteria on food. The only way to make the food safe is to hit 78c.
Source: Used to be a chef in England. We had to renew our food safety certification every two years.
Germs reproduce exponentially. This means there is a time (duration) when their number goes steeply from “OK” to “nope”.
While thawing you get closet to that time. During thawing the meat a second time, you might reach that time.
On a related note, you should thaw things in the refrigerator if you can.
Why doesn’t freezing burst the bacterial cells as well as the meat cells?
And, if I froze and thawed in the same plastic bag, wouldn’t that keep bacteria from getting on the surface?
And if I DID get bacteria on the surface, wouldn’t they be destroyed when I subsequently seared the surface during cooking?
these meats werent made for that type of doing and undoing. you gotta respect the crystals. it ruins everything.
Guga Foods did an experiment with this idea and he said that after a few thawing and refreezing it was starting to become noticeable in texture and taste. It shouldn’t make much difference taste and texture wise one or two times.
Isn’t most meat available at the grocery store (in US) already frozen once? Does that mean it shouldn’t be put in our home freezers?
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