Sorry - I know this one has been asked before RE: freezing raw chicken breasts 8 hours after the use by date. Unreasonably risky?

[Rainbunny]

I bought chicken breasts on Monday to grill for a dinner this week. Due to busy life stuff/other food needing to used up first etc... this never happened.They've been in the fridge all week. Got up this morning and noticed that the use by/freeze by date on the chicken was Friday April 8, I quickly put them in a freezer bag and stuffed them in the freezer (at 8am Saturday morning). Technically I was 8 hours late on freezing them although the cut of date seems somewhat arbitrary. Am I playing russian roulette with food poisoning when I actually cook them? Torn between hating to waste money on absurdly expensive organic chicken breasts and dying of salmonella etc... WWYD?

• Cut off date not of!

I did this a while back - like you I did it about 7am and we have since eaten them and survived :)

You'll know if they are off, if not when defrosted then during cooking. It's royally rank.

Give them a good sniff when they're defrosted, if they smell offensive then bin.

I'm sure it would be fine-if they smell when you defrost them chuck them then.

Chicken breasts are just like Cinderella: when the clock chimes 12 at midnight they turn from delicious organic chicken breasts into germ ridden poisonous atrocities!

You'll be fine.

Do you think bacteria have an alarm clock and start multiplying the minute it hits midnight on the use by date? There is still some common sense to be used here, and should be used in all food preparation..... Does the food smell ok? Does the food look ok? Has the packet expanded? All these will help determine if the food is edible. In future, if you are concerned, cook the meat before/on the date and then freeze it.
Im sure you will be fine though :)

I've done this many times and am alive

I'm a bit twitchy about things like this and would have probably cooked them before freezing.

NB - smell is not a totally reliable way of telling whether meat has gone off.

Thanks for the common sense responses! I especially like the Cinderella analogy lol! Yes they looked completely fine. Ridiculous how the small stuff in life consumes so much of the area in my brain use for anxiety!

I had campylobacter once and since then have never risked anything when it comes to chicken. Campylobacter doesn't smell.

I've found it depends where you get the chicken, if Co-op then they don't last til their use by date anyway and will be disgusting. Chicken doesn't seem to last as long as they say it does, so it's the one meat/product I wouldn't personally take a chance on. However, the good news is as everyone says, you can smell when it's off.

I would just cook them thoroughly - but then, I cook all chicken, thoroughly. It's not something I take many chances with.

You'll be fine.

Forgot about the camplylobacter, one of my relatives got this recently and was ill for many weeks...

Supermarket labels shouldn't mean we don't use our common sense as well. In many cases, our senses tell us whether food is good or not.

The chicken breasts didn't become deadly at midnight. I'm sure they'll be fine

Neither is a sell-by date, casualobserver!

DH used to work at a food research institution, where they made many studies to try to determine accurate sell by dates for all kinds of foods, with pretty much nil success. As one researcher reported "In the strictest laboratory conditions..the organism will do as it damn well pleases.."

Sell by dates have a fairly wide safety margin, as food manufacturers don't want to be sued (and do want to sell more food)

Use by dates are extraordinarily cautious - to take account of people with dodgy fridges etc. They'll be fine.

I buy all my meat from the butcher and it doesn't have use by dates so I do an awful lot of guesstimating. Campylobacter is present in over 50% of raw chicken - it has nothing to do with it being off. The best way of getting rid of it is to cook the chicken thoroughly which you should always do in any event with chicken and pork.

Personally I would have erred on the safe side and cooked them before freezing them. That is because it is hard to tell if chicken is contaminated with salmonella or campylobater because that does not cause a smell. Chances are you will be fine to eat them, but I would not take that chance.

Does freezing not get rid of campylobacter? goes off to google

I will freeze chicken up to a day after its use by. Haven't died yet!

Unlikely to be a problem, no doubt there is a built in safety margin in the way use by dates are calculated.

However I tend to be a bit obsessively squeamish when it comes to meat or eggs whilst DH will happily eat stuff that's past its date.

do this often (disorganised with a memory like a sieve) and we have all servived--so far

oops survived

This is why I always freeze meat the day I buy it unless I'm going to use it the next day.

This is why we have eyes and noses. Is it green or slimy? What does it smell Iike?Run away food never came with use by dates until the invention of the supermarket.

I regularly chuck two day out of date chicken in the freezer or eat it a few days out. If cooked through properly it should be fine. I'd be more concerned about it tasting rubbish than doing harm.