Frozen Food is this safe?

[hopefulsunshine11]

Hi,

I have a thing about frozen food, I just don't like it, anyway to save money we've started freezing a lot of stuff and batch cooking but I just don't think it tastes the same, I always find things go watery or chewy.

However, my issue is frozen meat specifically, we made a casserole yesterday and forgot to take the sausages out to defrost, so my oh cooked them from frozen in the air fryer, then put them in the slow cooker for 4/5 hours. Do you think they should have been defrosted first or safe enough to have consumed the way they were cooked? A bit late now but I have food anxiety!! They were bought fresh from the butchers and frozen.

They'll be fine.

As long as they were piping hot when cooked they should be fine

Fine

I do this often, frozen meat into slow cooker, we've all been fine.
If you think about it 4/5 hours is a long time cooking. Plus the air fryer. Its perfectly safe after that long cooking

They will be totally fine. I'm not sure what you're doing wrong with the batch cooking as I find stews/curries actually taste better after freezing!

Totally fine. Air fryers are perfect for cooking meat from frozen. I wouldn’t put frozen meat straight into a slow cooker myself (I know others do and are fine), but air frying it first is a great way to do it.

Thanks! Just needed that wee bit reassurance as I'm not the best with stuff like that. I'm also pregnant so on high alert with anything I eat!

Tbh not sure either, might just be my imagination as I just have a think about frozen food. Probably need to just snap out of that!

I always cook sausages from frozen in halogen oven and they wouldn't be going on to further cooking either! Frozen food is perfect if frozen and defrosted/heated correctly, where it gets bad is when something is done wrong. I freeze mashed potato and heated correctly you would never know the difference, do it the wrong way and it's gross! I have two freezers, nothing escapes the freezer here but stuff must go in fresh, be correctly packaged and then reheated properly.

Frozen food in the air fryer is fine, as long as it gets piping hot inside. In the slow cooker it's much more dodgy (esp with chicken).

When you freeze food, you stop the multiplication of bacteria which happens naturally with all food. When you start to defrost it, it picks up where it left off and bacteria start to multiply again once it reaches a certain temperature (it needs to be warm enough for this to happen). Once it's cooked, the bacteria are killed off at high temperatures. The problem with slow cookers is that they operate at a much lower temp, and everything takes much longer to get up to a 'safe' temp. So if you put frozen meat in, it will sit in the prime bacteria-multiplying temp zone for a lot longer (and hence have more bacteria in it). So I'd only ever put fully defrosted meat into a slow cooker.

Caveat... it's been a number of years since I did my food hygiene training, but I think I've remembered it right.

Now waiting for the masses of people to say they always put frozen things in the slow cooker and haven't died yet... Clearly it's not going to kill you every time, but the chances of getting food poisoning are higher this way, it doesn't mean you're definitely going to get it!