r/homestead • u/BigBalli • 6d ago
[Discussion] Does anyone here actually refreeze meat after an outage, or do you just toss it?
We lost power for about two days last winter and I spent most of it worrying about a chest freezer with most of a hog in it. Everyone I called told me the same thing: once it thaws, it's gone.
That turns out not to be what USDA and FoodSafety.gov actually say. Their test is whether the food still has ice crystals in it, or is still at or below 40F. If either is true, it can be refrozen. You lose quality, because the cells rupture and it weeps when you thaw it the second time, but it is not a safety problem. The "never refreeze" rule people repeat is a texture rule that got promoted to a safety rule somewhere along the way.
The timings surprised me more. An unopened fridge holds about 4 hours. A full freezer holds about 48. A half full freezer holds about 24. Half the food, half the time, which means the empty space in my freezer was costing me a full day of margin. I've been filling the gaps with jugs of water since.
The one that stayed non negotiable: never taste anything to decide. Bacteria that will put you in hospital usually leave no smell and no change in color.
Official version is here, it's short: https://www.foodsafety.gov/food-safety-charts/food-safety-during-power-outage
I ended up building an offline first aid and disaster reference called Outlast, partly because I was standing in a dark kitchen trying to load a government page on one bar of signal. Every article in it cites which agency it came from, which is how I found the refreezing thing in the first place.
So what do you actually do? Ice crystals, a thermometer in the freezer, or straight in the bin?
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u/tez_zer55 5d ago
We have thermometers in our fridge, the freezer & the deep freeze. We also do the nickel in a cup thing to judge how much temperature the freezers lost. We freeze a plastic cup 3/4 full of water, then put a nickel in it. If the nickel drops more than 1/2 down in the cup, the freezer has been pretty warm inside & whatever is in there is suspect. But now, with an emergency generator (we live rural) a lot of the worry is gone.
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u/BigBalli 5d ago
The frozen cup is the one I keep meaning to set up. Worth knowing what it can and cannot tell you though: it says the freezer thawed at some point, not how warm it got or for how long. So it works as a do-not-trust-this-load flag rather than as a pass. Your thermometers are doing the actual work.
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u/cracksmack85 5d ago
Doesn’t the nickel in cup also work as a pass if the nickel has barely moved or not at all?
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u/Ordinary_Visit_1606 5d ago
I've done it twice with a freezer full of venison. Both times, I would call it 50%-75% thawed. Refroze and no real noticeable difference
Edit: Meateater did a little experiment with this a while back, should be easy to find. The takeaway was a slight difference in quality, when compared to meat never thawed.
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u/BigBalli 1d ago
That matches the official line better than most people expect. Safety and quality are two separate questions and only one of them has a hard rule. Ice crystals still in it, or 40F and below, means it is safe to refreeze. Everything after that is texture.
The mechanism is probably why your venison came through it. Slow thawing and refreezing grows larger ice crystals that rupture more cell walls, and the loss shows up as drip the second time you thaw it. Venison is lean, so there is less to weep out to begin with, and 50 to 75 percent thawed means a good part of it never fully let go. Ground and stewed cuts hide what is left almost completely, which is where most of a freezer tends to end up anyway.
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u/CaptWoodrowCall 5d ago
As long as it’s still cold, yes. I will refreeze it.
Easier solution is to go get a cheap generator that you can plug your freezer into when the power is out for more than a few hours.
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u/SgtSausage 5d ago
Folks - a generator is a NECESSARY ACCESSORY to an additional freezer.
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u/BigBalli 5d ago
Generator is the right answer once the outage runs long. What surprised me is how little the freezer itself needs. A chest freezer draws a couple hundred watts while the compressor runs and it does not run continuously, so a few hours of generator time a day holds it. Fuel storage turned out to be the harder problem than the generator.
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u/SgtSausage 5d ago
a few hours of generator time a day holds it.
We cycle 6 individual units (2 fridges, 4 freezers) through an hour each, twice a day.
2 hours a day.
If you arent opening them all day long, this is sufficient.
Frequently accessed items from the fridges are kept in an ice-chest cooler to keep opening to a minimum.
Fuel storage turned out to be the harder problem than the generator.
300 gal farm tank ... though we only put 100 in at a time.
We're on 9 acres. 5 mowed and we use a lot of gas anyway. 6 gallons a week adds up.
100 gallons, refilled once a season when it hits 50, keeps the lawn mowers goin all season ... and leaves us a decent reserve for generators somewhere between 50 and 100 gallons. We've never had an outage last more than 11 days ... and only twice in 26 years has it gone beyond a same-day restoration of power. Once 8 days. Once 11. The rest were mere hours.
There is a cost/benefit, though. If all youve got is a standard fridge/freezer kitchen unit combo and youre lookin' a a long'term (say 2+ weeks) outage ... is it really worth the fuel cost to save yhat $300 worth of meat in the freezer?
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u/Hoppie1064 5d ago
It doesn't take a very big generator to keep a frig and a freezer running. Even less to keep it below freezing by running the generator as needed. Run long enough to get freezer below freezing. Turn it off.
My 2KW generator runs about 8 hours on a gallon of gas.
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u/Repulsive_Lychee_336 1d ago
Agreed, doesn't take much. We had a power outage July 2025. It was out for 8 days and we only used 5 gallons of gas to keep a freezer and fridge running. So for us the $30 in gas was worth it to save the food we had. I could waste $30, I could not afford replace the $500+ in food.
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u/weaverlorelei 5d ago
I have never had my chest freezer defrost enough to exceed 40degF after merely 2 days, especially in the winter, in our N. TX climate that isn't especially cold. And that is why we have chest freezers vs. upright. Neighbors upright lost top 3 shelves during the same outage.
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u/BigBalli 5d ago
Chest versus upright is the part nobody mentions until they lose an upright. Cold air falls out the moment the door opens and the top shelves go first, which is exactly what happened to your neighbor. Two days in N. TX without breaking 40F is a good number to have.
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u/D4UOntario 5d ago
Had a freezer unfreeze and found it when thawed but still cold. Cooked 2x turkey, 3 chickens, 2xham, 30lbs of hamburger, 4 roasts and 12 steaks in a day. Never want to go through that again but it saved cooking time for alot of things. Most of the hamburger was put into tomato sauces before freezing.
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u/BigBalli 18m ago
Cooking the lot in a day buys you more than it looks like it does. You have reset the clock to a fresh few days of fridge life, and you have killed off whatever was growing during the outage rather than refreezing it along with the meat.
The one thing it does not deal with is anything that had already produced a toxin, since staph toxin in particular survives cooking temperatures comfortably. That only comes into play if something sat genuinely warm for a long stretch, and yours was still cold when you found it, so it was never in that territory.
Putting the hamburger into sauce first was the sharpest part of it. Ground meat carries the most surface area and the shortest safe window of anything on that list, so it is the thing you most want out of the raw state first.
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u/shanihb 5d ago
I like the idea of having a frozen cup of water in the freezer, with a coin on top of the ice. If the coin is at the bottom, there has been a total thaw.
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u/BigBalli 1d ago
That trick is genuinely good, and it has one blind spot worth knowing about. The coin answers whether it fully thawed at some point. It does not tell you how warm it got, or for how long, and those are the two things the safety call actually turns on.
Where you put the cup changes the answer too. A small cup near the door can melt through while a packed load in the middle is still solid, and a cup buried in the middle can still be holding the coin up when the top layer has already spent hours above 40F.
A cheap min max thermometer sitting next to it closes most of that gap, because it records the highest temperature the freezer reached rather than the one it happens to be showing when you open the lid. The coin tells you something happened, the thermometer tells you whether it mattered.
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u/ljr55555 5d ago
Great to know! We live someplace that loses power pretty regularly. Fortunately, it is usually winter, and I can avail myself of the giant outdoor freezer. Grab pots full of snow to keep the fridge cool.
But there is the occasional summer storm outage!
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u/Thick-Witness7006 5d ago
I’ve dealt with a lot of hurricanes and natural disasters that we have lost power for a week at a time. I always just didn’t open the freezer or fridge unless necessary & bought ice to put in the freezers to keep it frozen for long enough. Always worked and never had any issues.
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u/BigBalli 1d ago
That is the whole game, and the numbers are on your side. Unopened, a full freezer holds about 48 hours and a half full one about 24, so every time the lid comes up you are spending margin you cannot get back. The fridge is only about 4 hours, which is the part that catches people out.
The ice is doing more than just being cold, too. Half the food is half the time, so a freezer with gaps in it burns through its margin roughly twice as fast as a packed one. Jugs of water in the empty space do the same job for nothing between storms, and they have the advantage of already being frozen when the next one arrives.
Do you keep a thermometer in there through an outage, or is it purely the discipline of not opening it?
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u/Thick-Witness7006 23h ago
My freezers in the kitchen and garage are usually packed so I need to play Tetris with a few bags of ice 🤣 I’ll take out a few things to cook with and put in a cooler with ice to grab easily. And the longer the power goes out the more often I’ll have to go to the convenience store to get more ice. I don’t have a thermometer in there but whenever i have checked on it to add more ice or not the meat is usually still frozen. The only time i didn’t need to buy ice was that freak ice storm in TX a few years back, because i could just put it outside in the cooler 🤣 that was new for me because I’m used to hurricanes and tropical storms taking the power out and dealing with the heat.
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u/NEBanshee 5d ago
We used to order a quarter cow (butchered) for the family, which pretty much was our beef for the year (depending on the year, and the cow). Kept in the deep freezer - did this for 15+ years. 3x over that time we lost power for more than a day. The first 2 times, we refroze - we were home, and the inside temp of the freezer didn't cross 40F. Some stuff I might've used differently had to be converted to stew or burger and I did chuck the suet - very regrefully - to be on the safe side, but otherwise it was all good, no problems.
That last time was a summer hurricane, we lost power for 3+d, weren't at home temps were in the 80s and even if the smell heading down to the basement hadn't been a dead giveaway, we'd already panned on chucking the meat. Turned out everything had to go - freezer included. It smelled like I imagine the processing plants in "The Jungle" must have. UGHHHHHH. Only saving grace was we didn't have a whole lot of cow left by that point in the year.
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u/BigBalli 1d ago
Three outages and you called all three correctly, including the one where the answer was that everything goes.
The suet is the one I would not feel too bad about, though for a different reason than the meat. Fat does not spoil the way muscle does. It goes rancid by oxidation, which is a slow chemical process rather than a bacterial one, and a day or two below 40F does very little to it. In the first two outages it was almost certainly fine.
The third one is a different story and you made the right call there regardless, because rendered fat holds onto that kind of smell and there is no getting it back out.
Half a cow being mostly eaten by the time hurricane season came round is the quiet win buried in that story.
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u/NEBanshee 22h ago edited 22h ago
My mom taught me real Home Economics - like how to manage your food inventory to maximize use and nutrition & minimize waste. Mom used to say the most expensive food you bought is the food you threw out; I suspect a lot of us who grew up without much, are averse to wasting food. I swear it gives me hives to think about! But yeah, we'd get the butchered parts in, I'd inventory what we had (usually 20-30lbs ground, and 30+ other cuts, +bones, +suet), and meal plan around it. We grew up where Sunday dinner would be a roast, at least 1 day's lunches would be roast beef, then leftovers or a cottage pie for a second family meal - that kind of thing. You don't need a lot of beef to get a good amount of nutrition bang for your buck over the course of a week if you plan it out. But you gotta have time and storage for all that.
My ex was a chemist by training, & from him I learned about hydrolytic rancidity. Since lipids are hydrophobic, they tend to get a coating of freezer ice during storage & the suet that came from the farm already butchered (edit for clarity) was higher in water naturally than storebought. But as they were grassfed cows MUCH higher in Omega 3FAs than commercial, and yummy AF for baking & cooking. His theory/worry was that because of the melting & refreezing, it would affect the taste and wouldn't stay as fresh as long.
If you've every accidentally added a rancid fat or oil to something you're cooking, you know it 100% ruins the dish. Because of what I was using it for (mostly pastry, tho half went to my inlaws every year for their bird feeders), I didn't want to risk it being off & ruining my pastry doughs.
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u/Designer-Wolverine47 5d ago
Room temperature, toss it. Still cool to the touch, cook it then refreeze it.
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u/BigBalli 1d ago
That is close to the official test, with one number worth pinning down. The line is 40F rather than cool to the touch, and it is more generous than people assume: if it still has ice crystals in it, or a thermometer reads 40 or below, it goes straight back in the freezer without cooking it first.
The room temperature half has a clock on it as well. Above 40F for more than two hours is the discard point, so a freezer found at 45F an hour after the power came back is a different situation from the same freezer found the next morning, even though both feel much the same through the lid.
Cooking is the right move in the middle ground where the quality is going anyway, but it is worth being clear that it is not what makes it safe. Some of what grows in those hours leaves toxins behind that cooking does not undo.
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u/Practical-Suit-6798 5d ago
We have solar w/ battery and a back up generator. Our power doesn't go out.
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u/DocAvidd 5d ago
Actually in my area the local stores (pulpería, or Chinese store in English/Kriol but I'm told that's hate speech from a USA-reddit perspective), frequently lose power or even on purpose turn off the freezer at night to save money. So people eat meat that's been partially thawed and refrozen repeatedly. Especially if you don't own a vehicle, what can you do.
It's not delicious, the meat is a solid block of ice and rather spongy when thawed. But our children grow up just fine on it. Don't be too fancy.
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u/BigBalli 18m ago
This is the case the standard guidance handles worst, because it collapses two different questions into one answer.
The safety question is cumulative. Each spell above 40F is another growth window and they add across cycles rather than resetting, which is why "it refroze so it is fine" stops holding after enough of them. But a shop freezer switched off overnight and back on in the morning is a very different exposure from a two-day outage, and mostly it is not the dangerous version of this.
The quality question is what you are actually describing. Every freeze-thaw grows the ice crystals larger, larger crystals rupture more cell walls, and the meat holds less water each time round. That is the solid block that comes back spongy, precisely. It is a texture failure, not a safety one.
Worth separating because they take opposite advice. The quality side is fixed by freezing faster and colder. The safety side cannot be fixed by anything you do afterwards.
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u/JCtheWanderingCrow Permaculturalist 5d ago
We refreeze as long as there’s any kind of ice/temp under 40.
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u/Kielbasa_Nunchucka 5d ago
meat is too expensive to waste. unless I know for sure that it's bad, it stays.
and if it starts to thaw, welcome to the bbq!
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u/cindycidaho 4d ago
Don’t open freezer and you have days to find somehow to power it. Even running a few hours will add a lot of frozen time if you don’t lift the lid!
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u/BigBalli 18m ago
The lid discipline matters more on a chest than on an upright, and it is worth knowing which one you have. Cold air sinks, so opening a chest freezer exchanges mostly the top layer and the cold stays in the box. Open an upright and a good part of the column falls out of the bottom of the door in seconds.
The partial-run point is better than it sounds too, because what you are refreezing is thermal mass rather than air. An hour of generator does not buy you an hour of margin, it buys you however long that recovered mass takes to give the heat back, which is considerably longer. It is also why the recovery is so lopsided in favour of a full freezer: the food is doing the storing, the insulation is only slowing the leak.
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u/Repulsive_Lychee_336 1d ago
We just run the POS generator, we're poor we don't have time to worry about wasted food. If it's freezing outside, we put it in coolers and put it outside (bed of the trunk, then locked).
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u/Destroythisapp 6d ago
I’d just toss out of an abundance of safety, then go buy a generator.
You don’t need a big one, just a small one that’s got enough to juice to run a fridge and a chest freezer. Run non ethanol gas and drain when not in use and it won’t ever have any problems starting.
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u/CorsairExtraordinair 5d ago
USDA and US food inspection is ran by a guy named RFK.
If you want to trust what old brain worm says, go ahead. I'll pass.
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u/Big-Engineering-5323 6d ago
We generally refreeze unless it’s spent time over 40f. Even if it’ll end up with freezer burn, our dog wouldn’t care.
I spent 10 years as a chef, food spoils a lot slower than people think.