Frozen Meats
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I am currently making breakfast sausage. I used a full 7 # porkloin on sale and added about 4# of back fat that I had and cut up, vacuum packed and froze about 2 weeks ago. Now, I have seasoned and added cure to the cut up porkloin and let it set in the the fridge over night. The next morning I added the frozen cut up back fat and put it all through the grinder (for easy grinding coarse and fine). It came out great. Now I was wanting to stuff 1 # freezer bags and freeze the breakfast sausage. My question is: can I freeze this newly mixed meat, since I partly froze the pork loin and used the already frozen back fat. Thinking about it, I was always told, as a kid, never to refreeze raw meat. I never knew why? So now am I safe to freeze this breakfest sausage for use later? Otherwise, I will make linked sausages and parboil and/or smoke up. Help asap. Thanks.
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Little Baby Teddy Your fine to refreeze it. Just curious why you would cure a fresh product though?
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Little Baby Teddy Ok Makes sense.
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Little Baby Teddy There are no safety issues with re-freezing meat. There are potential quality issues but they really don’t apply to ground meats so long as you don’t discard whatever liquid appears when thawing. You just mix it back in.
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KillerNoms yep just ground it frozen and mixed it back in. Thanks.
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The concerns about refreezing meat (ground or otherwise) have to do both with safety and quality. If you safely thawed the meat and did not keep it long, refreezing shouldn’t be a problem. Don’t take my word for it, though. Take a look at what the USDA has to say about it.
