Help, am I poisioning myself

Since you can buy ready frozen ready cooked chicken there is no generic reason. The dodgy bit is that you don't know how long the chicken has lurked around and your home has probably got millions of germs in.

My advice would be to buy ready frozen and take some out each morning for your sarnie, by the time you get to work the chicken has defrosted and yet has kept the sandwich cool.

mrcheerful

Dunno! But, I've been doing this for years/decades ... I buy large joints of beef, ham, pork (even chicken ready cooked) then slice it and freeze it. I tend to use 'Layering paper' which used to be available everywhere but nowadays I can only seem to locate from Lakeland. I slice the meat- place a layer of the paper into a Tupperware-style container , repeat until the box is full - then into the freezer. IMHO, there's a ratio between the original size of the 'joint' and the flavour of the meal. Little pieces of meat don't quite have the taste of big pieces ... but one can't eat all of the 'large pieces' at one meal. There's also the marketing ploy of charging more pro-rata for small pieces than larger. The use of layering paper makes it easier to separate a small quantity of slices from the box of frozen meat. And of course the normal hygiene rules of scrubbed hands/ finger nails / knife / chopping board and storage container apply. Any way, it's never done me any har....... aargh!

As long as you don't leave it hanging around for too long (hours) before you freeze it you'll be fine.

Si

Strange DIY topic, but there you go!

My understanding (limited because I'm only competent to boil up a couple of slices of toast) is that chicken and similar should not be frozen then reheated. There are some microbes which I believe aren't phased by freezing, and they multiply when unfrozen.

You could certainly be causing problems if I understand it correctly. I'm sure my wife has mentioned this before now.

Andrew

There aren't many which survive cooking though, and food cooked in supermarkets is [supposed to be] temp. checked to make sure the customers don't die.

As long as it's cooled as quickly as possible (quite how you cool something quickly at home I've never really understood though) he'll be fine.

Si

I always understood it to be you can't refreeze chicken which has been frozen ... unless of course you cook it first. Its the process of defrosting meat which leads to the problem and repeated defrosting exposes the bacteria to the right sort of temperature to reproduce to large amounts without having had any culling done by way of exposure to high heat.

Providing you cook the chicken properly you shouldn't have any problems.

If it was making you "ill" then you'd be doing something wrong - and you'd know about it if you were.

Sometimes raw chicken is marked as "not to be refrozen" as its spent time already frozen.

These haven't been frozen.

Si

Rubbish.

As long as you're hygienic in handling the raw and cooked chicken and don't allow cooked chicken to come into contact with raw chickn or drippings from it you'll be OK.

You're still alive aren't you?

Mary

Then it shouldn't be a problem. :)

I looked at buying a package containing a few slices of ham with the idea of 'putting in the sarnie'. Compared to buying a big ham, boiling it and freezer-storing the slices : - sliced ham == £60/Kg ; home sliced = £ 10/ Kg. I can't afford to follow your advice ... :( I can just afford to D-I-Y.

it sounds a good way to proceed. Freeze it as fast as you can after purchase - don't let it sit around warm which is when the bacteria multiply.

Robert

Thanks all very much! I started doing it becouse of the cost difference of buying pre pakged chicken, and I do agree it tast better than very thin slices, Mick.

Meats are high risk foods. They should be frozen quickly after cooking, not a day later, and always heated through thoroughly after defrosting.

NT

How long have you been doing this and has it caused you any problems before? I would have thought freezing after cooking should be relatively safe, it's reheating cooked chicken that causes the problems IIRC. You could cook your own chicken thus adding your own bit to the quality control.

Yes, it certainly could.

The problem is that this process is safe if you do it right, but it has risks (and considerable risks) if you don't. To be safe you need to ensure that the chicken is cooked and then frozen _rapidly_ - before bugs have time to breed in the cooling chicken. If you're buying long-cooked chickens from a shop, carrying them home, then trying to freeze them in an already-filled domestic freezer, then this can be awkward to guarantee.

I presume you don't eat your chicken sandwiches frozen. So how do you defrost this ready-cooked chicken ? If you do that slowly, then there's a risk it will spend a long time at a suitably warm bug-friendly temperature before the core is ready to eat. If you wish to eat a frozen chicken, you have to get it hot enough _afterwards_ to kill anything that's in it, or grew during defrosting. Of course there's a limit on how much extra cooking you want to give something that has already been cooked once. Defrosting rapidly (microwave) will help.

If you can do this correctly for both situations, then you're safe. But get it wrong and there's a real risk to it.

I see no reason whatsoever why spending a week in a fridge (set at 4C) is any better than spending a couple of days in the fridge defrosting, a couple of weeks in the freezer, and then a couple of more days defrosting.

It's not multiple defrosts or freezings which is harmfull, but total time at temperature suitable for bugs to breed.

For small stuff (chicken legs), I've given up on defrosting in the kitchen. Take lump of frozen chicken legs. Nuke on full power until some starts to unfreeze. (most at this point will still be frozen, but you'll have warmed it up from -20C to 0C, which is much much weaker as ice and can easily be split apart). Then split them apart, put on a tray/plate, and nuke at half power, rotating every 2-3 minutes. (while preparing onions/... for dish). In a few minutes they are defrosted. (and at about 50C, leave them like this for a few minutes to ensure they are heated through)

This works very, very well for stuff like stews, you just keep it on full power, stirring every minute to break up the frozen lumps.

For whole chickens, this of course doesn't work, I leave those in the fridge for a couple of days to unfreeze.

Alternatively, a bit less aggressively, if your oven can do fan mode, with just the fan blowing ambient air over them, that's good for defrosting small stuff.

I don't know how I'm still alive.

Mary

Why b other, for stews? It will thaw in the stewpot.

Even less aggressively, leave the frozen whatever on a plate on the kitchen counter. It will thaw. No energy cost.

Mary

Hey! Don't freeze it while it's still warm!

Mary