appreciate that.
I will toss it all
thanks
it might have been this phenomenon.
The 4 times I’ve had meat or duck smell sour over the past 3 years, it has been vacuum packed meat or duck.
Sour smell is different than ammonia smell
3 Likes
I generally go by taste and don’t mind if there’s a little funky smell (like my aged steaks or roasts, I mean). Ground is going to get fully cooked anyway, vs a fresh steak that smells bad once the package is breached.
The ammonia is different, though, as honkman says. Did it persist or was it just on opening, then gone?
1 Like
I ended up throwing out all the remainder of the cooked meatballs and the 25 uncooked frozen meat.
The odor was very slight, compared to when I opened some frozen duck and frozen lamb, also vacuum packed, that smelled bad as soon as I opened the package.
The cooked meatballs were cooked until browned and I could not detect any off smell in the cooked ones. I suspect the veal was starting to go sour when it got packed.
The fresh beef and pork I mixed it with were very fresh with no odor.
I’m still not sure if it was ammonia or the lactic acid smell that I’m reading about. The raw meatball mixture didnt smell funny, so I would say the odor of the veal did dissipate.
I think I will avoid most vacuum packs of raw meat for a while.
1 Like
(post deleted by author)
This is a dangerous practice.
You should not work with thawed frozen products and then refreeze. It should be cooked before being frozen again.
1 Like
Pretty sure USDA says it’s okay if it wasn’t out of the fridge over 2 hours, and assuming fridge-thawed vs being out on the counter.
Screws up texture, though.
1 Like
I didn’t think the texture would be affected in a meatball made with thawed veal, fresh beef, fresh pork, bread, egg, parmesan, then frozen, to be fully cooked later.
It’s all moot since I threw the frozen raw meatballs out.
Thanks for you for your input.
I had not frozen raw meatballs made from either raw fresh meat or raw defrosted meat before. None of the meatballs I froze were cooked. I cooked 6 of the meatballs as soon as I made them, until they were crispy and the internal temp was 180⁰F.
The frozen raw meatballs that were made with 1/3 defrosted veal and 2/3 fresh pork and fresh beef went into the green bin in compostable green bag this morning.
…..
There are ways to refreeze refrigerated thawed beef and other ground meat, if you are comfortable doing so, and there is no hint of decay.
There was a hint of decay with my veal, so absolutely, refreezing the veal was a dumb thing for me to do.
I would not have asked about using the ground veal, or been worried about the ground veal, if I wasn’t on the fence or having second thoughts when I posted.
Yeah, sometimes it’s barely noticeable - and in your case most of the stuff is not previously frozen. But in the general case, each refreeze cycle damages the food’s cells (whether meat or veg) to a greater or lesser extent, because the ice crystals take up more volume than liquid water, and they’re jagged little guys.
The biggest factor - how quickly or slowly the food is frozen - was figured out by Clarence Birdseye who invented a double belt flash freezer system to freeze foods extremely quickly (and went on to become the founding father of an entire frozen foods industry).
Slow freezing means much larger crystals and more damage, and quick freezing the opposite. So if you’ve got a good freezer, didn’t have it open much on the day when you refroze an item, and didn’t shove a whole bunch of mass in there all at the same time, it really might be imperceptible.
I knew this but failed to think about it one day while breaking down a whole chuck roll… I put the various roasts, steaks, etc. in bags, then in a moment particularly lacking in brilliance, shoved all 35 pounds of beef into my (very good, but not that good) freezer.
I figured out my screwup when I pulled a 5 pound roast out and tossed into the fridge side to thaw, and saw when thawed that the bag had almost 11 ounces of liquid in it. For a 5 pound roast, you’d expect maybe an ounce or two. Took me a while to realize it was all my fault. The roast turned out pretty dry. Edible but not great.
1 Like
We have a quick freeze setting on our freezer. I should use it more often.
