Beef – Conservation of ground beef

food-safetyfreezingground-beef

We planned to eat hamburgers tonight, so I bought 1.5 Kg of fresh ground beef at my store, at 3 PM.
But then, we decided to postpone that to tomorrow night.

Ground beef can be kept for at most 24 hours in a fridge right ?
It is not vacuum sealed, the butcher packed it in front of me.

So what should I do ? (it is 5:30 PM now)

  • Leave in the fridge and cook the meat before 3 PM tomorrow (and reheat at dinner time)
  • Freeze the meat as-is (in the store-sealed package)
  • Prepare the patties and freeze them now
  • Other ?

I don't have a microwave, I would defrost it in the fridge (I heard room temperature isn't appropriate, especially for ground meat in which micro-organisms develop quickly).

If I choose to freeze the meat as-is, I guess I would have to defrost it at least a bit to form patties. But if I freeze the patties, can I pan-fry them right away ?

Freezing should be safe, even though a friend of mine once tried to cook ground meat he had put in the freezer a few days before (right after buying it, he said) ; and it seemed not to be good anymore (rotten or something) ; so I'm not sure.

Thanks in advance, I'd rather not poison everyone tomorrow 🙂

EDIT : The hamburgers were fine — I lowered a bit my fridge temperature overnight, just to be sure, and cooked it well before serving.

Best Answer

Per the FDA, you can hold the ground beef, refrigerated, for one to two days.

Assuming you have:

  • Bought the meat from a reputable source (you seem to have if you watched them wrap it)
  • Have kept it well refrigerated since buying it, and will do so until cooking it

I would just cook and eat it as normal at dinner time tomorrow, since it has been refrigerated the entire time. 24 hours is not a magic number. 26 or 28 hours is not that different.

Now, several days extra time before cooking would be a big difference compared to several hours.

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