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dono (not verified)

4 years 7 months ago

Shelf-life time of every freezing food depends on multiple factors and, due to that, there's not a single chart around that is 100% real. It's mostly based on recommendations, renewal of products (assuring the roll of the economy) and limited and not always related facts and attempts.

Some food are considered as "non-perishables" and yet some official shelf-life put them on a 1-2 years shelf-time at most. One of such example is the honey. Real pure honey can last decades even if opened while fake (brown sugar) or over-filtered honey can barely last 5 to 6 months. Due to that, both real pure honey and fake over-filtered honey (watered-down) are rated with the same expiration dates. Real pure honey can't spoil (as it's already a 100% spoiled product created within the bees' body. It's 100% bee shit made from digested sugar (crystallized), acid and vitamins you find in pollen that doesn't spoils.) and can only crystallize (crystallized sugar, acide and vitamins separates) which can be reverted by simply heating it up. What's spoiling in real pure honey is the foreign material that find its way into the container such as tiny pieces of whatever was put into the container like the food that might have been dipped (or a spoon).
The same can be said about real maple syrup. Maple Syrup doesn't spoil at all. It's such a non-perishable that the one way, in Quebec in Canada, that allowed a maple storage syrup to discover that over 2,000 liters of maple syrup in barrels was replaced with water barrels was the fact that the water barrel showed signs of rust while maple barrel doesn't rust at all even after 10 years of storage. Maple Syrup is made of vegetal-based sugar (crystallized like honey), synthetic sugar and few vitamins + minerals and plant acids you find in the trees. The thing that spoil the maple syrup is actually the container and not the maple syrup itself.

ANY food kept below the 0F can be usually kept indefinitely as long as there was never any kind of partial defrost involved. This is where some people might not have noticed or remember that one day the power got cut out or that their freeze has a defrost system that raise the temperature enough to allow the fans to extract the humidity from the freezer. (This allow the freezer to avoid any accumulation of ice in it.) If your freezer is one of those tomb models that has constant ice build up on its sides and properly close down air-tight, it's one of those freezer that can store for a LOT longer than other freezer that has a defrost system implemented.

Even so, there are a few things to know about how long frozen food can last in a freezer (even a no-defrost one).
1) How much water is in the food.
High-water food tends drastically change its molecules during the Thawing process as water expand when frozen. Meat, vegetables and noodles in soups are a great example. Soup that gets frozen for a long time will become mushy and soft as the frozen water in the solid food will shrink and make said solid food fragile (soft).

2) Is there any parts that are heat or cold resistant?
Remember that all parts of the food might not freeze evenly. Some part might take a lot more time to freeze and, during this additional time, it might develop a small amount of bacteria. Large bones are an example of such thing as they tend to retain the meat's heat longer and so can develop small amount of bacteria. While all the bacteria will be dead frozen by the time you defrost it, there might be some spoil or unappetizing area around it. If left alone, the dead bacterial might attract more (new) bacteria too. This is why it can be risky to freeze certain types of mushrooms as some tend to have a certain resistance to cold on top of having high rate of bacterial development even during the thaw phase.

3) Is there any kind of mineral or substance that might end up as toxic or bad during thawing?
While small amount of minerals or other substances might not be "bad", high rated food might become toxic. Food with high rate in iron, for example, will oxide quite fast during the thaw phase which involve too much water. Such a thing will create rust in the food, which is toxic. This is why it's suggested to quick-boil high-iron&water food like spinach if it was frozen and to eat it within the next 1-2 hours.

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