Eight ones that are safe to eat anyway.
Since I’ve started cooking sous vide, I’ve been using the vacuum sealer for freezer bags. It seems to pretty much eliminate any freezer burn.
10 thoughts on “Foods Past Their “Use Buy Date””
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Peanut Butter will separate and the oil will puddle … it was too much hassle so I trashed the bottle. It was 4 months over and I must have bought it with less than a month to go (thank you Walmart!) because I am used to PB lasting forever in the cupboard! Was still proabably safe to eat…
I keep all my dried rice and beans in sealed bottles (those 40oz peanut jars work great!) to keep the ‘cupboard moths’ out of them. Had an infestation and everything got infested with crawlies…
Peanut butter will turn rancid eventually. It should be good for a couple of years before that happens, though.
We buy “natural” peanut butter that comes pre-separated 🙂 and love our stirrer like this one.
We don’t eat peanut butter, because omega 6s.
I’ve been meaning to get one of those vacuum sealer doohickies. Right now I just throw a month’s portions in Ziploc bags and try t eat everything in good orders. Funny bit in the article: Canned goods are safe for 10 months after the expiry. Except Spam, which is good for five years. (So to speak…)
We’ve again begun buying “asceptic milk” (Wegman’s terminology), which is just ultra pasteurized milk of the type sold in Europe. It lasts six to nine months without refrigeration.
I’m also partial to duck confit, though many other meats can be preserved this way (“confit” is derived from the French “confire”, which translates as “to preserve”). It is sort of like cooking sous vide, and the resulting meat can be stored without refrigeration for anywhere from months to years – no vacuum bagging involved, just immersion in fat in a sealed jar.
Though fowl are the main meats for confit, pork is also used. I’m interested in seeing whether beef can be preserved this way, too. Kat an I are going in with our niece and nephew on raising Wagyu Black Angus beef cattle on our new farm in Tennessee. It would be really cool if one could make en confit beef that would last a long time, and have as awesome a flavor as duck or goose confit.
Canned goods last as long as the can. It’s sealed in the can at above the boiling point of water. Once the can stops being sealed, you won’t have any problem telling, especially down wind. It’s not hard to find stories about cans being opened after decades with perfectly edible contents.
Most use by dates have nothing to do with safety, if you look they’re almost always an arbitrary one year after packaging. some things degrade from oxygen exposure but don’t become dangerous.
The higher temperature milk is pasteurized at, the longer it will last. Different stores will buy different levels with extended freshness dates. The trade off is that the higher temp will give a slight taste. Milk is supposed to last at least a week after the date on the bottle. I stopped buying milk at Walmart when I got tired of having to sort through their stack to find some that wasn’t days past the sell by date. The gallon I bought on the 5th is dated June 19. Once it’s opened, it’ll start to go in a week or so, but it still would only be sour milk and not any sort of hazard.
“Canned goods last as long as the can. It’s sealed in the can at above the boiling point of water. Once the can stops being sealed, you won’t have any problem telling, especially down wind. It’s not hard to find stories about cans being opened after decades with perfectly edible contents.”
Indeed, there’s at least one guy on Youtube that opens and eats military rations from WWII and even earlier. I happened to see one recently where he ate (part of) a beef ration from around 1898 (the can had rusted through in a couple of places, so he scraped off the black stuff to get to the still-technically-edible portion.
Most “use by dates” have little if any relationship with spoilage — the US Department of Agriculture (among others) requires each batch has an ID marker in case of recalls and that is its primary purpose.
“Most use by dates have nothing to do with safety”
What ze said.
The package says “best if used by…” not “this will make you sick if you eat it after…”
I grew up in the country. We grew and preserved most of our own food. Our version of “best if used by” was, if it smelled bad, was growing a fur coat, or tried to escape before cooking it was probably not a good idea to eat.
Actually, the middle one was conditional. You could always scrape off the furry part and as long as it still passed tests A and C, you were OK.
Strangely, humanity survived for thousands of years before the advent of packaging with a “best if used by” date. Why modern humans insist on being held by the hand like children is a bit beyond me. I’m a reasonably intelligent adult human possessed of a modicum of common sense, I’m pretty sure I can figure it out on my own and if some can’t…well…perhaps the gene pool needs to be thinned out a little bit.