Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Freezer burn?

Well since I got a good response to my last post (Thank you Bulletbutt) I'll share another one. A little bit off topic - but were still talking about frozen food.

If your thawing out a package of frozen meat/fish that isn't too thick, an inch or so, and want to have thawed for dinner in a relatively short time try this.

Microwave on a very low power setting until it is starting to get a little less than rock hard. My current microwave has a max power of 10 and I use a power setting of 2 for thawing. The automatic defrost setting on my microwave does'nt work worth a schit so I do it manually. Three or four minutes on power setting 2 works about right. Don't thaw it out all the way. The problem I've had with every microwave I've owned is that the meat/fish will start to cook on the edges if you try and completely thaw it. Once it gets to where you can bend it but it is still slightly frozen, place it in a large cast iron or thick aluminium frying pan. DON'T put it on the stove with heat, just let it sit in the pan and turn it over after one side thaws.

It works on the principle of heat/cold transfer. Iron, steel or aluminium tranfers heat or cold faster than air.

Thawing a piece of meat or fish this way you can have it ready to cook in ahout 30 to 45 minutes without cooking the edges or without taking up the whole sink to thaw it in water and drowning it and losing flavor.

If you don't microwave it first, it will still thaw in about 1/3 the time it will take just sitting it out on the counter. Frozen shrimp will thaw out in about 30 minutes if you only do one layer (line the pan with foil, turn once). This also works great to bring a refrigerated steak or whatever to room tempature before cooking. Line a pan with foil, season your steak, set it in there for 20 minutes, turning once, and voila, room tempature seasoned steak ready to cook. (Room tempature meat avoids the purple in the middle) I know most of you know this, but I had to had to start learning somewhere.

I'm sure some of you reading this already know about these tricks. There not my original ideas. They used to sell a magic metal thawing device in an infomercial on tv for about 20 bucks. The frying pan you have in your kitchen works just as good.

I am not a gunwriter or the greatest hunter of game but:

I AM A DAMN GOOD COOK (with a warped sense of humor)

fish head

I've got to put my two cents in, too. (If someone's already mentioned this, I missed it.) re freezer burn, one thing that really helps is having a chest freezer rather than upright. Put a freezer thermometer in each, then leave the door open and see how long it takes for the temp to rise. I tested that out years ago when I was writing a fish cookbook; the upright drops cold out the door immediately. It takes many minutes--even in summer--for the temp to start rising in a chest freezer.
The result is less up and down of temps; less possibility of freezer burn.
For the record, muledeer and I have 'lost' steaks from some animals in the freezer, and when organizing again pre-rifle season, they surface. (There was this one cow elk, that had a real penchant for doing that. Year after year. I guess it was a mistake to dub her Elvira. I know the last piece that surfaced was close to 10 years old.) We've 'found' meat that's 5, 6 7 years old, and with double wrapping carefully with freezer paper, which is all we do, we have to trim an edge here and there. (freezerburn)
mizwhitetail

I will add a little something to what mizwhitetail wrote, which related to what fish head wrote:

We have two main chest freezers. What we kill this year goes into one that is separated by boxes into various catagories, and is generally kept very full. That meat is generally "saved" for next year's consumption, so rarely gets disturbed. It is also always quick-frozen by scattering new packages among the frozen ones.

Even the meat (and fish and birds) that go into our everyday freezer are separated by boxes, and so rarely bashed about. We just take a package of burger or steak off the top, instead of stirring it up, looking for steak or pheasant or fish. This keeps the seals on our wrapping (of whatever type) very tight.

Which is pretty much what fish head is talking about. Wrap packages tightly, freeze them quickly, don't stir them up, and keep them well-frozen, and what's inside will last a long time.

This is a little off subject, but I'm trying something new to me and I'll share it. Maybe some of you have done it, or would want to try it.
Some time ago I read something by a "chef" that interested me: He said to let steak sit in the refrigerator a few days after it's thawed, allowing the blood to drain away from the meat. He said it'll tenderize the meat, more so than if it just sat there in its juices.
I remember he said not to use a metal pan or rack for the meat to sit on, and I finally devised a rack out of plastic to fit in the bottom of a plastic Rubbermaid container with a snap on lid. It looks like it will allow the blood to drain off the meat really well.
Of course, as soon as I made one, I found a new Rubbermaid "Produce Saver" in the grocery store that comes with a rack and is just right for the amount of meat I'm dealing with. They hold 5 cups and have a green lid, if you go looking for one.
I'd be interested in others' thoughts on this. Do you think it would work, or just make for dryer meat?

B2T

Hmm. I haven't heard of that one, but meat does age even after it's been frozen, if we leave it in the refrigerator for a few days. There's no reason it shouldn't, because the same enzymes are present.

We do tend to drain meat of the extra blood if we do that, and then dry it further before cooking, which results in a better browning on the outside. But I have no idea if leaving it in the blood has any effect on tenderness. I'll have to ask mizwhitetail: She has all the latest meat research in her files, and might have seen something on that.

Re: the chef who says meat will age in the fridge after being thawed, if drained. The only caveat would be that it wasn't frozen in rigor. And I'm sure the chef would say the same thing since the good beef processors would never butcher and freeze beef while it's in rigor. (Cheap beef may be tough for other reasons, but not that.) On the other hand, I've heard some stories about guys processing and freezing their game animals too soon (while the carcass was still in rigor) and all the scientific journals say there's no way to cure that. Not fridge aging after thawing, not long slow cooking. It's stays pretty tough when you do that.
One of my editors admits he did it last fall with a young cow elk. He was so excited that he'd gotten an elk close to home without having to work as hard as he usually does, that he decided to butcher it next day. He's been butchering his own animals for years, and he knows it's not as tender as it should be, and he knew why it wasn't when he told me the story.
mizwhitetail

Well, if my new method shows any promise, I will post it. I'm skeptical of improving game meat by taking the juices out of it, but if it makes it more tender that will be good to know.

Venison ages WELL if kept at about 34 degrees for at least 16 days, and probably much longer. This is called "dry aging," I think. The finest beef is aged for a couple of months (saw this on "Best Steak" on the Travel Channel TV.)

But...you don't cut it in steaks until you're ready to eat it. Why this is, I don't know. The best venison I've ever eaten in my life was aged about 20 days, and it was excellent. I'm not a deer fan, either.

It is, I think, a process where the enzimes break down and it's kept in a limbo bordering on decay. Same with cured ham, too...it's better after a couple of years.

The venison was extremely tender and crusty and black on the outside, just cut it away. The meat smelled fine and fresh. It can grow a green mold on it, but you just wipe it off and eat it so long as it doesn't smell decayed.

Gravity will drain the blood out in the fridge, just put something to catch it beneath the meat and don't place it so no dripping from above gets on it.

I don't think it will age properly if frozen, but if you have a lot of meat, what choice? Just put some back for dry aging.

Hey, fish head here again

I'll throw in a couple of more opinions on the last few posts.

With regards to aging, blood in the meat, tender vs not, etc.

Gene L has it right when he's talking about "dry aged beef" . It is a method that fine steakhouses use to get the most tender, tasty steaks.

Aging after an animal is hung, cut, wrapped and frozen it's a different story. IMHO, there is a different set of conditions in a fridge once meat is thawed, especially if it has been cut into steaks.

To properly age meat past 4 or 5 or 6 days, it must hung whole or in quarters in an optimal enviroment. Tempature, humidity, air circulation, everything must be exactly right. A piece of meat/steak left in a fridge for a couple of weeks will certainly be rancid. I realize Bulletbutt and Gene L are'nt talking about aging for weeks, but rather just a few days. IMHO, I will venture a guess that leaving in the fridge for a couple of more days won't result in a more tender piece of meat. It will be interesting to hear your results. I've never tried it, although I do know that buying a beef steak or pork chop from the store and leaving in the fridge for more than a few days usually winds up not with it not being as tasty as fresh. Too long in the fridge and it gets tossed.

In my younger days I came up with the bright idea of trying to age some deer quarters in an old fridge. Sounded good, seemed like the right thing to do. After about 5 or 6 days it started smelling a little funny. We cut it up and wrapped it anyway, and let's just say it was slightly "gamey" (understatement). I found out from that experience it's better to just let hang in the garage for a couple of days. A refridgerator is just not the right enviroment for aging meat wether it's fresh or frozen and thawed. Too much humidity and poor air ciculation makes for a bad piece of meat.

I'm not trying to bash your ideas, I'm just relaying my personal experiences. So, no offense, OK?

Tender and juicy vs tender and dry?

More to follow, I gotta go walk the dog. He's driving me nuts.

fish head

Sorry, but meat doesn't have to be kept in the carcass or quarters to age.

This is was discussed on another thread (I think in "General Hunting") not too long ago. I brought up a test mizwhitetail and I did with a big, old bull elk I killed last November. The shoulders, hindquarters, backstraps, filets, neck meat were all cut off the carcass after three days of the bull hanging in the shop of the ranch where it was killed. The weather was still perfect for aging when I brought it home, so we kept the pieces in our garage/shop.

After a four days (a week since he'd been killed) we decided to see how the meat was doing, so cut off maybe 15 inches of one of the backstraps, then brought it inside and cooked a couple of 1" steaks from it. They were still kind of chewy, so we left the rest of the chunk in the refrigerator, inside a plastic bag. Every day we'd cut another chunk off and eat it, and it definitely became more tender for another week. At that point the elk had been aging for over two weeks total, and it was definitely time to butcher, so we did it. He isn't the most tender elk in the world, but he's pretty darn chewable--and the meat in the shop aged at just the same apparent rate as the mat in our refrigerator.

We have also performed essentially the same experiment with steaks taken out of the freezer. They do get more tender as they sit in the refrigerator, though we haven't drained all the liquid off them.

And no, aging doesn't have to be totally controlled, as in a walk-in cooler kept at 34 degrees. The temperature can be up to 50 degrees or even a little more. Warmer temperatures just accelerate the aging process--though obviously the meat can't be kept as long as when the temperature never gets above 40.

Obviously some of the people posting here don't know where the original question came from, and why. My wife Eileen (mizwhitetail) just published the latest of her 8 game cookbooks, SLICE OF THE WILD, which deals with everything from the moment of the shot to recipes. It includesncluding field care, aging the meat, butchering for your specific purposes, and recipes. Included is all the latest meat science from various sources.

The reviews so far (the book has only been out a month) are saying that it may be the best book yet on the topic of big game meat, partly because it includes the science, instead of speculation. I would suggest that those who are speculating about all this stuff could read all about aging and other aspects of meat in the book.

I started this thread on freezer-burn because we have never had a problem with it. We live off game, with three 15-cubic-foot freezers (two chest and one upright) that by the end of each fall are all filled with big game, birds and fish. We do vacuum-pack some stuff (especially birds and fish) but we only use common freezer paper on big game, the kind that's plastic-coated on one side, and simply double-wrap tightly. We have never had any problem with freezer-burn in over 25 years of doing it this way, even ith meat that's a couple of years old, so I was curious about why and when freezer-burn might be happening with other folks' meat. This started several months ago, so I was kind of surprised to see this thread revived in the past week. Thanks again for your responses.

OK, nuff said. I guess I should buy the book.

I've noticed that venison that has been hung in the garage for a week, butchered, frozen, then thawed and refrigerated for a few days is slightly more tender and flavorful than meat which underwent the same process, but was not refrigerated.

It's an interesting subject to me. It's alot easier to understand the whats-and-whys when there are good reference materials out there like Eileen's book. I found it very interesting, and plan to give copies of it as gifts to my friends.
Every once in a while something like this thread will come up, and some really good info come out. It's not an argument, it's sharing experiences. I appreciate the views...and the book.

MY FELLINGS ARE HURT !

Cold shoulder, add a few flames, I think I'm suffering from " freezer burn".

Didn't mean to hurt anybody's feelings!

...but every time one of these threads starts, Eileen or I end up practically writing the book all over again, because the same misconceptions come up every time. Instead of doing it again, I suggested a more expensive (but less time-consuming) way of getting the best current info.

I hope I didn't hurt your feelings...you were a big part of the "really good info" I referred to above!

JB; You are expensive, but it's money well spent. I just ordered two more copies of the book for gifts to friends.

We got the order and the books will be on their way! Thanks again.

I was watching one of the TV chefs a couple of months back and he preached this as being very important. He liked to defrost beef 36 hours ahead of time to let it drain and "set"...He didn't mention anything about flavour, but apparently a "dry" steak fry's a lot more consistantly than one running with blood/juice. He also advised removing the steaks from the fridge an hour or so before hand and allowing them to come up to room temp, by which he meant a cool storage type room rather than a warm kitchen. Again this was more to do with the cooking side than "aging" or flavour.

fish head,

A fridge works fine for hanging game, and certainly beats racing the warm weather to get a carcass butchered. Below is a Roe carcass hanging in a fridge in my shed.



That fridge is just big enough for two Roe or one 80lb Fallow pricket carcass. A lot of stalkers over here use double door coke chillers and while ideal for 4 roe, they are a bit lacking in height internally for anything bigger than a Fallow pricket.

I'm looking for a larger unit myself, but I don't have the space nor the ��� for a proper walk-in chiller.

I generally hang my carcasses about 10 to 14 days with the temp set just above freezing. The important thing abut this fridge is that it has a built in fan to circulate the air, and this runs constantly as long as the door is shut.

Good air circulation is cruial and for best results the carcasses must have space around them to allow the air to circulate.

The other thing is that carcass must be in good condition when it goes in..if you gut shoot a beast, drag it through a swamp after doing the gralloch and then transport it home over the hood of your car, don't be surprise if the meat is poor quality.

Regards,

Peter