Archive:Quick Questions on food safety / sell by / use by dates

Wonder_Girl

If I cooked a pie at home on Sunday I would still eat it 2-3 days later so I would treat the shop bought pie like this as it was baked in store that day.

They only reduce them as they can only sell ones that have been cooked on the day, I imagine the reason for the same day date is probably as they don't know how you are going to store it after you leave the store and therefore can't guarantee that it will be safe to eat it the following day after you have left it in the boot of a hot car for 3 hours

My husband is paranoid about dates on food, that is why I have a black permanent marker in the kitchen and black out the dates on everything I buy:rolleyes:, if it looks ok and smells ok we eat it, and non of us have ever had any food poisoning yet



WG x

Patchwork_Quilt

Well, he seems to have survived so far. I usually think one or two days after the sell by date won't hurt

Wee_Bargain_Hunter

We sometimes use a cool bag with ice packs or bags of frozen veg when bringing things home from the shops in the hot weather. Like you a chicken had gone "off" & I only discovered it after taking it out of the freezer. Really messed up my meal plans...

Penelope_Penguin

I'll add this to the existing thread on food safety, to keep ideas together

Penny. x

blueberrypie

Wee_Bargain_Hunter wrote: »

We sometimes use a cool bag with ice packs or bags of frozen veg when bringing things home from the shops in the hot weather. Like you a chicken had gone "off" & I only discovered it after taking it out of the freezer. Really messed up my meal plans...

I always use a cooler-bag when I go grocery-shopping. It's not always needed, but I've just got into the routine of having a large cooler-bag in the boot of the car. I also have a couple of huge strong bags (very similar to Ikea's big blue bags) and I shop using those so I don't get any more plastic bags than necessary, and when I pack at the check-out, I make sure all the stuff that is frozen/refrigerated goes into one of those. As long as it's not too full, I can just set it straight into the cooler-bag and zip up the top.

Because the cooler-bag lives in the car, it just makes it easy - I don't have to remember to take it with me, and if I happen to buy more frozen/refrigerated stuff than I expected to, the bag is already there anyway.

blueberrypie

randomer wrote: »

I bought 3lb mince from the butchers and without thinking froze the lot in one big bag. If I thaw it out and make bolognaise is it OK to refreeze some of it?

Yes, or if you have a meat-cleaver you could just take the mince from the package, chop the frozen lump in half with the cleaver and put one half straight back into the freezer.

mancbird

Thank you all for your replies He ate the pies and was fine I did wonder why the use by date was the same day if the pies were baked in store that day, but as kalaika says, they have to cover themselves I personally won't eat them (I'm being silly I know) but now if he wants to eat them I won't give him a hard time about it

greenbee

Apparently there is an ad campaign being run about use by dates to make sure people understand the difference between those and BBE dates, as lots of older people have been giving themselves food poisoning (it'll generally be listeria from this kind of thing).

As a general rule:

Display until - this is to tell the shop when to take it off the shelf, as if they leave it after this then the customer won't have time to get it home before it needs eating
Best before - won't taste as nice after this date, but won't do you any harm
Use by - may start to go off, so recommended to eat by this date (after that, I guess its down to whether you want to use the sniff test!)

Personally I pay no attention to these dates, but then I'm reasonably healthy with good eyesight and sense of smell!

Angel_S_2

Hi all just a quick question.

I got some mince out the freezer (tues) with the intention to use it last night (wed) but couldn't in the end so I was going to cook it tonight (thurs). Will that be ok? It was defrosed in the fridge and has been in the fridge since, I can't remember how close to the use by it was frozen but I'm pretty sure it would have been done within a few days of buying as I split the pack to freeze two portions.

Thank you x

missychrissy

I used a jar of Uncle Ben's Cantonese sauce dated 18/07/07 3 days ago. It tasted absolutely fine and I'm still here to tell the tale.