How To Thaw Meat

Hi there, I'm Matt from the Underground Cookery School and today I'm going to do a video cookery lesson for you. I'd like to show you how to properly defrost meat. Now, over here, as you can see, that's nice and frozen.

The best way of defrosting this is not in the microwave. I don't like doing it that way because it's very easy to cook the meat through, and you don't want to do that. I think the safest way it to put it in a tray and place that tray in the bottom shelf of your fridge.

The reason it's so important to put it in the bottom of the fridge is because if there is any excess juice it won't drip over other foods and cross-contaminate. If you put it in the tray, you've completely avoided that scenario. Now, that's been in the fridge for about 8 hours now.

There's about 2 pounds of minced lamb in there. Generally speaking, you're looking at about 5 hours per pound. If I take this out, there's quite a lot of extra moisture in there, which is why it's so important to use the tray.

That's now completely defrosted. The other way I think that you could use that takes half as much time, about 2 hours per pound, is to submerge that in cold water, and maybe once every hour and a half, refresh the water, but make sure it's cold. The reason that both, I think, are safer, because in both cases, is if the water is less than 8 degrees or your fridge is less than 8 degrees, then it's less likely that harmful bacteria can develop at a temperature below 8 degrees.

The safety zone is either below 8 degrees or above 85 degrees. So, in both cases you're going to be absolutely fine. In my opinion, that's definitely the best way of defrosting or thawing frozen meat. .