If you have purchased a copious number of T-bone and porterhouse steaks to be enjoyed at some point in the not-so-distant future, then you may understandably wonder how long your steaks will last in the deep freeze. Generally speaking, whole cuts of meat, like beef steaks, remain viable in the freezer for six months to a year, provided that you store them properly. It’s also helpful here to clarify what “going bad” means. Bad meat can include steaks that are freezer burned but can also refer to rancid meat. The way you deal with each of these issues determines how well the steaks respond to their time in the freezer.
Let’s start with freezer burn. Your steaks will get freezer burned –- go bad, in this case -– if they’re not stored correctly. When your meat gets freezer burned, the moisture in the outer layers of the meat has evaporated over the weeks and months the meat has been in the freezer. The affected meat takes on a brown appearance. You can still eat them, though they’ll probably be dry and unpleasant.
To prevent this from happening and to prep them for the freezer, you should wrap them in a non-porous plastic. (Vacuum-wrapping is even better freezer hack.) You’ll provide additional protection for the steaks if you slip them into a zip-top bag. This one step goes a long way toward ensuring that your meat doesn’t succumb to freezer burn before you can eat it.
Dealing with rancid meat
When you freeze your steaks, you effectively slow down the rate at which the micro-organisms in them can be fruitful and multiply. This puts the brakes on spoilage. However, it doesn’t rid the steaks of the potentially harmful bacteria. They’re still in there. Freezing the steaks just stunts bacteria growth, and thus, slows down the potential for spoilage.
Freezing also does nothing for meat that is already spoiled, however. If you put spoiled meat into the freezer, it’ll come out spoiled, too. Shoot. Even pan-searing a steak won’t save it if it’s bad to start with. Therefore, you must learn to identify bad meat before it gets stashed away (or cooked).
Your best bet for identifying bad meat is to use your nose. Bad steaks are going to stink, sometimes to High Heaven, depending on how rancid the meat is. The way the steaks feel also gives you clues about how good the meat is. If you can touch the steak and the meat springs back to where it was before, it’s good to go. It should also be moist, but not wet and slimy. If it’s not springy and slimy to boot, toss it out.
Tips for freezing your steaks
Frozen beef steaks should be stored in the freezer at zero degrees Fahrenheit (or -18 degrees Celsius). This is the temperature that the USDA recommends because it slows down the rate at which potentially harmful bacteria, like e. Coli, can grow in the meat. In other words, provided that you start with good meat, you’ll give your steaks few opportunities to go bad in the freezer before you’re ready to eat them.
Once it’s packed and ready to go, you’ll want to label the meat with a date. The date you put the meat into the freezer counts as one option. You’ll want to check this every couple of months to ensure that the meat doesn’t go too long in the freezer before you eat it.
The other dating option you have is the “use by” date. The meat producer will label the meat with this date. Factors such as when the meat was slaughtered and packaged originally go into this calculation. You should consider this date even if the steaks are frozen. In other words, if you’ve taken the meat out to thaw, make sure that it’s ready to eat by its “use by” date if you can.
