Pasteurizing cooked ground beef.

Hi, if i have cooked ground beef, cool it down then sous vide it. Can i pasteurize it? and for how long can i store it in the fridge?

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Brandon_Byrd_40557

Cooked ground beef is prone to developing "warmed over flavor" which is caused by fat oxidation. To avoid that, you'd need to pull a hard vacuum on the beef, and that would end up crushing the mince, ruining the texture. The tradeoff is going to be between texture and warmed-over flavor. You can avoid the warmed over flavor by crushing the beef in a vacuum bag or you can preserve the texture and simply use a Ziplok, but at the expense of taste. If you choose the later route, there's not really an advantage using SV to pasteurize because if you've thoroughly cooked your ground beef, it's already going to be pasteurized. Just transfer it to a clean airtight container in the fridge and you'll be fine.

The exception is ground beef that's been formed to create a product like a burger or meatball (rather than just having a bunch of loose ground beef). If you want to store these, freeze them first so that they become rigid and then pull a hard vacuum on them. If you skip the freeze step, you risk squashing your product and ruining it. It's even better if you can start out from raw patties or meatballs (or whatever) and then freeze, seal, and cook sous vide until pasteurized.

Rodrigo_Olguin_27086

Hi Brandon, thanks for your time answering my question. In this case texture is not important to me. What I do is I fry lamb or beef which I grind very coarse. This goes with fried onions (about 33% of it). After I portion the meat in sous vide bags I add the hot tomato sauce, veggies, etc. I need to do big amounts of this and portion it. Thats why I'd like to know how to pasteurize it(temperature and time), and for how long could I store it in the fridge.

Thx...

raphael_n_110069

Hi Rodrigo. My understanding is that you already have cooked ground beef, so by definition of 'cooked' in this context, your food is already pasteurized. If you're looking to preserve it for a longer period of time, simply vacuum seal it and keep in the lowest section of your refrigerator, ideally in a crisper. As for how long, that's a tough question to answer. It depends on the specific temperature of your refrigerator. IIRC, Modernist Cuisine suggested three days at 5C, up to thirty days at 1C.

If you're batch cooking large portions, I would recommend freezing them into portions. Since they're tightly sealed, freezer burn isn't a big danger. You also mentioned that texture isn't of particular importance, so the small amount of ice crystal development shouldn't be an issue. You can easily transfer them directly to a sous-vide bath when you need to serve them.