The Best Way to Thaw Meat

for most purposes I think the best way of thawing frozen meat at home is to submerge it under barely running cold water I'm gonna show you my experiment that cemented that conclusion in my mind and we're gonna learn about the physics of why this method works so well I'm also gonna show you some other options but first let's talk about why you'd want to deal with frozen meat in the kitchen maybe you just got a good deal on some steaks so you bought some extra to freeze at home but the main reason that I buy frozen meat is because it's really the only way for me to get really good meat like prime or grass-fed beef check out these beautiful grass-fed rib eyes I got from students at Barry College up in North Georgia Andrew well and his classmates look after this herd of Angus cattle it's not unusual for small producers to only sell frozen meat to consumers so if you really care about your beef and how its raised frozen might be your best bet we raise a Mac here we got a couple pastures that would move them from we do a little rotation 'el grazing and that helps to keep the pastures up and we don't have a lack of nutrients in the fields and we let them graze freely they're not confined or anything and contrast most cows that you'd see in the meat aisle lived much of their lives in feedlots the grass feeding is healthier for you the cow and arguably the environment a lot of people think the grass feeding also makes the beef taste better but if you want some really serious fat you got to mix some grain into their diet too we go with the grass-fed grain finish so we get that nice marbling in there yeah you do look at that I'm gonna get back to you boys later but first an experiment here's these for cheaper steaks I got from the grocery store and froze will thaw one by just moving it to the fridge that's easy it's safe but holy crap it took 13 hours to thaw and that's a relatively small piece of meat bigger things are gonna take days and days in there it's a great method if you've got the time but let's just say you don't another one will thaw in the microwave I'll just turn the power way down that should be safe and five minutes later hmm that doesn't seem to be doing very much well let's just turn it up a little bit higher and then off I cooked it I totally cooked it that happened so quickly - and now it's ruined third stake I'm just gonna leave on the kitchen table no actually I'm gonna be slightly smarter than that and leave it on an aluminum baking sheet aluminum is about the most thermally conductive metal you're likely to find in your kitchen for the same reason that pizza Steel's beat pizza stones metals are electrically conductive and electrons can convey Heat aluminum is crazy conductive it's just bad at holding on to heat that's why we don't use it for pizza but it's good for thawing stuff two hours later and this is ready to cook two hours ain't bad some food safety obsessives would say this is dangerous though the surface area of that meat which may be contaminated with bacteria is close to room temperature for a lot of this time which would allow bacteria to multiply no no you're gonna sear the exterior anyway right that would kill all of that bacteria on the surface so I don't know whatever but here here's the method that keeps everyone happy put a bowl in the sink fill it up with cold tap water and dunk in the steak then just reduce the water to a trickle cold tap water I'm not kidding you that steak was thawed and ready to cook after 20 minutes yeah the water was basically room-temperature but it thawed so quickly there simply wasn't much time for surface bacteria to multiply under there why does this work so well well let's go back to the campus of Georgia Tech and consult dr. Shannon Yi an expert in heat transfer in the air you're looking at a heat transfer coefficient on the order of 5 to 10 watts per meter Kelvin right and then if you're able to submerse it and circulate that fluid you're on the order of a hundred to a thousand watts per meter square Kelvin but why right well basically heat is transferred when a hot particle comes into contact with a cooler particle and transfers its heat over and water simply has more particles to come into contact with other particles and do the job liquids are more dense than gas and that density matters because it's the collisions that are occurring the molecular collisions that are occurring on the surface right and so with a liquid you get a lot more collisions on with a gas for still water it would be still their exact same work reasoning right it's how many collisions what frequency of collisions are you getting but then you add a little bit of motion to the equation and things really speed up that's why we did this under running water not to replenish the bowl water with warm water as the stake sucks the heat out of the water around it we're just doing this to get the water moving a little bit that's constantly bringing a fresh wave of warmer water molecules into contact with the cooler molecules in the steak we know you know you blow across a hot soup spoon right it cools quicker than if you just let it sit and then drink it yeah you probably could accelerate this process a bit by using warm water but cool water is probably safer from a bacterial standpoint you also don't risk accidentally poaching your beef in this water and honestly I don't think that it makes much of a difference it's the density and the movement that thaws the steak great method there is a special bonus method for thawing meat don't if you're planning to cook it whole you can put a rock-solid frozen steak into a low oven and cook it straight away that might even result in a better tasting finished product than any of these methods we've just discussed I'll show you how it's done next time

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Views: 602,605

Rating: 4.9179239 out of 5

Keywords: defrost meat, thaw meat, thaw beef, defrost beef, defrost chicken, thaw chicken, defrost steak, thaw meat quickly, frozen steak, defrost chicken in microwave, defrost chicken fast, defrost chicken in fridge, defrost beef in microwave, defrost beef quickly, defrost beef fast, defrost beef without microwave, defrost meat in microwave, defrost meat hack, defrost meat in cold water, thaw meat fast, thaw meat in microwave, thaw meat in cold water, thaw chicken fast

Id: X0ahKON2vNY

Length: 5min 15sec (315 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 05 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/butterscotchbull]

Yee is trash. He probably had to cut his interview all up just so it would make sense.

[u/alphanovember]

He mentions GA Tech in almost every video.