Thoughts on Frozen Meat

[SmokinGrillin]

Has Meathead written anything about buying frozen steaks, meats?

[JCGrill]

I would not presume that frozen is as good as fresh, because my experience with fresh-caught fish says otherwise. So I do go to the butcher and buy fresh. But I have a freezer and I use it. Maybe not as good, but good enough.

[JCGrill]

By the way, did anyone see this?

http://people.com/food/wendys-twitter-frozen-beef/

[Baltassar]

My Costco always seems to sell steaks in packs of three. It's just me and my wife around here mostly, so if steak night comes around, steak number three gets frozen. Next time, same thing. Time after that, it's the two frozen extras. I am sure that at some level of detail there is a difference between frozen and never-frozen, and maybe a blind test side by side would reveal it. But in all honesty my pallet cannot detect the difference from one meal to the next. I do have a very cold freezer (cold enough to freeze vodka solid, as I discovered accidentally ... ), so perhaps it just does a good job keeping the ice crystals reasonable.

Anyway, somebody puts a "previously frozen" but properly cooked steak in front of me, it's gonna get eaten, for sure.

[HorseDoctor]

Fresh meat may be better by a bit, but I'm betting it is a very tiny bit. I'm pretty sure that 90+% of the general public's taste isn't discriminating enough to tell the difference between properly handled frozen and "fresh" meat once it's served to them. Of course, most everyone here at AR is probably the exception...

[jgaepi]

I did a search for this topic because I was just exploring the Snake Rivers website for the first time. And, coincidentally, I just read the passage in Franklin's book about it as well, like the original poster. I assumed it could come fresh on ice. For such a large company, I don't understand why. But that question was kind of answered in my chat discussion with them just now. I started with the question of fresh, but they only ship frozen or slightly thawed. Slightly thawed sucks because it forces you to either thaw out on the spot (less likely to order in bulk) or re-freeze, which sucks for the quality further. I also asked about their July 4th special but that doesn't apply to brisket.

But here is where the topic got really interesting. The person suggested they could give me their local distributors' info so I can track down their meat locally. And, I guess naively I assumed their meat was all local, small farm where they are based. The two companies they gave me were Sysco Industries and Pacific Seafood. For those that don't at least know Sysco, they run the large semis transporting mass quantities of food to fast food joints, etc. They aren't a chain store like this chat person assumed. I know less about Pacific Seafood but I assume similar mass quantity.

So to further my naivety, I assume that Sysco is involved on the delivery to Snake Rivers versus distributor of Snake Rivers? Which is probably why all their meat is frozen, because it takes such a long time to get it from Point A to B to C. So it dampens my assumption that Snake Rivers is somehow more local, small farm, sustainable.

I could be totally wrong about all of this. But, at least in the meantime, I'm going to just focus on what my local butchers have.