In an ideal world we would have a large, well-equipped kitchen and enough time every day to go to the market, buy good fresh produce and cook some award-winning recipes, although everyday life is not so nice and we have to look for solutions such as doing one shop a week and cooking and freezing both products and recipes.
It’s a fact that frozen products are cheaper than fresh ones, but sometimes we come across another problem, such as when we buy a tray of meat, for example, and we have leftovers and to prevent them from spoiling we have to freeze them. Does meat lose quality this way or is it an urban myth?
It’s not freezing it, it’s how to defrost it
“Does frozen meat lose quality? I don’t agree. How you defrost it is more important than the fact of freezing it”, the experts from the Etxezarreta butcher’s shop in Donosti say from their TikTok account.
As the butcher experts assure us, if you put good meat in a good freezer, like the ones we all have at home, you get good meat out of it.
The trick is that the meat, the faster it freezes the better: “If it freezes slowly, it creates more frost, but if you put in good product, then you get good product”.
What would be the right way to defrost it? Ideally, as they explain in the video, it should be wrapped and separated as much as possible so that it thaws more easily. “Stacked steaks on top of each other is not a good idea, the more separated, the better”.
As for the correct way to defrost meat, “the best thing to do is to put it in the fridge 24 hours before and let it defrost little by little. If you defrost it too quickly, it always spoils more”, they say.
“Some people put it in hot water, or in the microwave on the defrost program…” but as the experts confess, this is not the best way to maintain the best quality.
