Can you refreeze defrosted food?

[Gingerbear]

I have heard different opinions about this. Can you or cant you refreeze defrosted food. The meat that I buy from the store defrosted or fresh... I sometimes bring home and refreeze if I am not going to use it fast. It is always fine when I defrost it. what do you all say? My ex-husband's grandmother always said that you could.

[Izzy Knight]

generally I don't refreeze defrosted seafood. With meat, however, I do make exceptions. If the meat hasn't begun to look soggy (you know, kinda dripping) I refreeze it. But if i microwave-drfrost, i never refreeze it. because you might accidentally cook it.
However, I usually takes my momma'a advice: repackage the meat into small portions in plastic bags.

[Bergy]

This is a very tricky question - For safety sake NO WAY - from the practical sense what I do is to partially defrost the meat just to the stage of being able to separate the pieces then vacuum seal them and refreeze. With chicken or fish don't,
it can be very dangerous - with some fruit & veggies i do the same as the meat but to be really safe you should not refreeze. So I tell you not to for safety sake but I too have refrozen. Does it sound like I'm taking you around the Maypole?

[hokiegal]

I agree with Bergy about safety, but once when my son left the freezer open overnight I had to look it up what could be refrozen. There is info on the US Food & Drug Admin 800 telephone # and probably on their web site for specific type food. If I remember correctly, I refroze all of the meat as it still had ice crystals in middle-but lost icecream and a couple of casseroles.
Hope this helps.

[Lennie]

Bergy is absolutely right -- for safety sake, you shouldn't refreeze. As I've mentioned before here in other threads, I'm a real safety freak, so I don't ever refreeze any meat that's been defrosted. But that's just me; I know folks who take less caution and they're all still alive

[Kat]

My SIL is a food scientist. She says as long as the food wasn't kept in unsafe conditions for too long, you can refreeze anything. You will notice, though, the food *quality* (not safety) may degrade.

So if you had a whole chicken in the freezer, then put it in the fridge for a day, you'd be able to re-freeze it. If you thawed the chicken on the counter (or quickly in a water bath), you should cook it well, right away.

Once we bought a frozen bag of french fries at 9:00pm, and forgot to put them in the freezer. We found them at 11:00am. She said they were ok to eat, just throw them back in the freezer.

She is really careful though. She refuses to eat alfalfa sprouts or mushrooms.

[Kat]

My husband's rule of thumb to determine if something was edible used to be: eat it. If you get sick, it was bad.

LOL.

[angelazul12]

Did you have good results with the thawed french fries? The same thing just happened to me and I don't know if we should eat the french fries after refreezing them.

[duonyte]

This is a really old thread and I don't know if the people who posted originally are still active. I would not hesitate to cook the fries and see how they look. It is very unlikely that they spoiled in any way, but fries being fries, there may have been a texture change that won't be appealing. Just give it a try - at most you'll have wasted a little time and cooking power. If they turn out ok, then all is good.

I recently suffered 4 days of power outages - I threw out all the meat and seafood, too much danger there, but some things I refroze and so far they've been good - fruit, veggies, things like that.

[bookreader3158]

Yes it may be a really really old post BUT same rules would apply I am always curious about this,but I usually only buy enough to cook for a few days..

[internetnut]

I had the same thing happen as another poster. My nephews left a freshly well stocked freezer door cracked over night. I was so mad and looked online at like the USDA website. The website said yes you could refreeze keeping in mind the quality won't be the same. Matter fact tonight I'm using some refroze chicken tonight and have already used some of the refroze items.