Meat Tips for Beginning Chefs

USING AND DEALING WITH FROZEN MEATS

Jack Bragen

The best way to preserve meat is by freezing it. As long as the meat is at a low enough temperature, bacteria can’t grow in it, and the decay process cannot take place. If you are unsure about a cut of meat, first of all use your sense of smell to determine if massive decay has rotted the piece, and secondly, it can be sterilized by thorough cooking on a stovetop.
If you purchase a large package of meat, and have already frozen the entire thing without first dividing it up to smaller portions, yet you still only want to use some of it, you can defrost it halfway in the microwave oven. Once this is done, you can cut off the amount that you want to use. Then, the part that you’re not using that day can be immediately returned to the freezer. This process could not be done with a gradual defrost, since you have provided the bacteria with the time it needs to grow. The above process is used because you failed to divide up the meat before you froze it in the first place, or because you bought it in a frozen state to begin with.
In order to halfway defrost something in the microwave oven with some amount of accuracy, enter half the weight in pounds and tenths of pounds after you push the button on your microwave that allows defrosting by weight. Most new microwave ovens have this feature.
The freezer doesn’t actually kill bacteria; it puts it into suspended animation. Therefore, freezing, by itself doesn’t prevent you from getting sick from the bacteria in meat. The meat doesn’t have to smell bad to contain a strain of bacteria that can make you ill. Bad smell is an indicator that the bacteria has grown on a massive scale in the meat to the extent that you can never consume it even after cooking. If you were to cook a rotten piece of meat thoroughly, and consume it, you wouldn’t be poisoned by virtue of live bacteria; you would instead be poisoned by the waste products that were produced when the bacteria was growing, that remain in the meat and that also make it smell and taste rotten.
To be poisoned by live bacteria, as can happen by eating a piece of meat that wasn’t completely cooked, it doesn’t require massive bacterial growth. Some strains of bacteria can start growing in your stomach that start with just a few parent cells, or, theoretically, even a single cell.
Pasteurization is named after it’s inventor, Louis Pasteur, who discovered that heat could destroy microbes. When you cook something thoroughly, it becomes pasteurized because the heat has killed all the microbes in it.
Remember to check the expiration date on your meat before buying it and check for “puffiness” in the packaging, which can indicate decay.