How to thaw raw meat quickly?

[susan8020]

Thawing slowly in the fridge or cold water doesn't work in our chaotic schedule. We need to thaw it quickly for immediate use. Microwave or hot water have obvious problems. Any workarounds, or other approaches?

Comments

[twistedchick]

How quickly are you talking about? You may be running up against the inherent physical properties of the meat itself.

[susan8020]

Within an hour at most? If it sits longer, interruptions have a chance to happen.

[twistedchick]

A lot depends on the thickness of the cut or piece of meat; the thinner, the easier to thaw.

I have found that something up to 3/4 inch will thaw within an hour inside a plastic bag if it's in a shallowish dish (not a deep pot) of water that is tepid, and if it's turned over and the water changed every 15 minutes. As it thaws, it cools the water, so replacing (or adding more) tepid water makes a difference. If I just drop the bag into a pot of water and go away without doing this, it takes a lot longer.

I do this a lot with fish, for example, and then cook it in a covered dish in the microwave (with lime or paprika or mushrooms or whatever) for about 6 minutes. If there is any ice still left in it, that part will explode a little (hence the cover) but it will all still taste very good. It can also be pan-fried after thawing, which works well without the explosions, generally.

[busaikko]

Also, what kind of meat is it? I freeze thinly-sliced meat, and just throw it in the frying pan frozen. But that probably wouldn't work with thick chunks.

[susan8020]

The most would be about a five-pound mound of hamburger, or a 5 pound roast. Sometimes two or three chicken thighs that have been frozen together. Sometimes two thick pork chops frozen together side by side.

[busaikko]

It also depends on what you are going to do with the meat. If you are making a pasta sauce with ground beef, you can put the frozen meat in the pan and start cooking; when one layer is browned, scrap it off with the spatula and cook the exposed frozen bit. Or add water, cover, and let it steam/boil.

This is a cooking site by someone who hates cooking frozen meat but it has a recipe, and some of her objections are just, LOL, no ("you get a cooked mass of meat!"-->apply spatula, no biggie; "you get all the fat!"-->and you drain it off like in any other cooking, no biggie). I don't have an oven, but I'd totally cook frozen chicken in a pressure cooker: add some veg and spices and broth, and you could probably do a nice stew or curry.

Google also found this advice, never tried it, but:
I forget if this falls under the category of "convection" or "thermal diffusion" (if I'm wrong I welcome comments), but if you will take your frozen meat and put it in an airtight zip bag and then in a (clean) sink, run the faucet over this in tepid to cool water (not hot or even very warm). You will be amazed at how quickly this will thaw meat. It will thaw about an inch of meat about every 10 minutes.

The trick is that you want the littlest water possible, but enough to wash over the majority of the bag.

It will thaw your meat very quickly without having to microwave it or trying to cook a frozen piece of meat. If you're trying to thaw a roast then you're probably in trouble, but for thinner cuts of meat/fish/etc., this thaws very quickly.link

There's also a hilarious forum post on cooking a frozen roast which has precise times, oven temperatures, color photos, and... a graph of cooking temperatures *g*

[susan8020]

Those uses for frozen meat are great, and I've done things like that myself when I had time and a normal kitchen. What I need now is a quick method for thawing stuff that Himself wants to no-brainer fry on the stovetop or no-brainer roast/broil in the Infrawave oven.

[susan8020]

I love the idea of running water! This I can do. I can put the meat in a bowl and set it outside under a garden faucet under a small amount of water flow.

Also, maybe I'll try thawing in a slow cooker full of water, with the cooker replacing the heat the water loses and hopefully keeping the water circulating. For this the meat will need to be on a rack, not on the bottom of the pot.

Probably this would need to be lowest temp setting and have the lid off.

Thanks for the link to this wonderful site:
http://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/18191/is-it-bad-to-cook-frozen-meat-without-waiting-it-to-be-unfrozen

[twistedchick]

You might consider packaging your frozen meat in smaller amounts, too. Five pounds of anything is going to take a considerable time to thaw, whereas five one-pound packages will be much faster. It's a trade-off, the time spent packaging or the time spent waiting for it to thaw. I've found that putting a double layer of wax paper in between pieces of meat or fish will do it, and the paper will come off as it thaws.

[susan8020]

Following this idea, we bought our meat yesterday at CostCo where they have some frozen meats already divided: hamburger patties with wax paper between, chicken thighs packaged two or three in small bundles inside the big bundle, wonderful tamales easy to break apart while frozen (corn husks are a great invention! ;-)

Unfortunately we're limited on prep time before freezing too, because going to town is an all day exhausting trip for us, and if things sit in the fridge waiting to be divided for freezing, then things happen.... Fortunately, we have plenty of freezer space for sticking the big CostCo bundles straight in, and enough money to buy big bundles.

But I'd still like more good ideas for thawing stuff that isn't pre-divided.

[windtear]

Okay, reading over the replies, it looks to me like what you need, more than anything else, is to prepare your meats before freezing in such a way that they'll unfreeze fast. Basically, separate your cuts before you pop them in the freezer (I'm single, so I put each piece into its own clean ziplock baggie [can be reused if you're on a tight budget but if you do WASH THEM FIRST] and thaw a baggie at a time; waxed/baking paper between cuts also works with multiple pieces in a bag), shape your mince into thin flat disks/bars like rissoles (don't forget your cut separators between each!) before freezing, and they won't take nearly as long to thaw, and pick thinner cuts (schnitzels thaw quicker than inch-thick slabs).

With frying and roasting, I generally find that if the meat is thin enough, the meat can be cooked from frozen almost as quickly as from fully thawed (maybe add five minutes).

Also, meat can sit in the fridge for a couple of days without going off, so if it is likely your partner will be in a position later that day to forage without you, it probably won't hurt anything to pull down an extra piece and have it there in the fridge for him to grab.

I guess what I'm saying is that it's all in the prep work, really, and it's doable if you put the prep in.

[susan8020]

Woops, I meant to link my long reply about CostCo under your comment here but it went up above.

Thanks to all commenters! (More ideas welcome, pls!)

[17catherines]

I hate to say this, but at my food safety course we were warned *stringently* against defrosting by anything other than the fridge or microwave methods. The cold water method can be very dangerous, as it holds the defrosting meats at unsafe temperatures.

Your best bet is to freeze things as flat as possible - maximise their surface area so that they defrost quickly and evenly.

Actually, I've just noticed that windtear is right on the ball with all this stuff, and I'm not being too helpful, but I did want to mention the food safety thing, because I didn't know about it previous to that course.

[nineveh_uk]

When thawing meat I haven't got time to leave, or don't want to put in the microwave (particularly fish) I tend to put it on a metal tray on the biggest metal surface I can find - in my case, the not-switched-on metal hob of the metal cooker. It's not a good idea for an extended period of time or large items, but it works very well with smaller pieces of meat and fish (yesterday's whole sea bass was completely thawed in under an hour).

[susan8020]

That's a good idea. Maybe a heavy cast iron skillet would work too.

What a beautiful user pic you have!