Thawing

Is it just me, or does anyone else get annoyed when it comes time to thaw something from the freezer?  There is always some dinner planning element when thawing is involved and I don't know about you, but I'm more of a spur-of-the-moment dinner decider.

If you do find yourself thawing a chicken breast or steak from the freezer, know that there are good ways to go about it and there are bad ways.

Food that isn't thawed properly can spread foodborne illnesses, but that can be avoided if you use one of the following thawing methods:

• Leave it in the refrigerator overnight
• Use the microwave to thaw it
• Leave it under cold running water
• Use it in it’s frozen state while cooking (Think about those frozen hamburger patties)

Problems can occur when meat is left on a counter to thaw at room temperature.  In the food sanitation world, there is something called the Temperature Danger Zone (queue the scary music!).  The TDZ is a temperature range between 41 and 135 degrees Fahrenheit in which bacteria grows and multiplies.  Room temperature, which for me is usually 74 degrees, is an ideal temperature for bacteria growth.  If meat has been left out on the counter for longer than four hours, you need to toss it and make it an Anthony's Coal Fire Pizza night.

Blanching

I have always been under the impression that blanching something, like a vegetable (or sometimes fruit) is done to bring out the brighter natural color of food. It seems like more of a luxury than a necessity, reserved only for those who are looking to impress their dinner-party guests. I mean, I was brought up with the assumption that vegetables can go straight from the pot to the serving dish, as long as there is a pad of butter sitting on top.

But I admittedly missed the mark a little bit on this one.  While blanching vegetables does in fact enhance the color of the food, it is a technique that is found in almost all restaurant kitchens.

To give a little background, blanching is the process of boiling a vegetable in salted water to the point right before desired tenderness. It is then immediately taken out and dunked in a bath of ice water to stop the vegetable from cooking further.

The key piece of the puzzle that I have been missing for all of these years is that the vegetable can then be finished off at a later time and this is exactly what restaurants do!  Before a restaurant opens for the day, the prep-staff will cook vegetables, like broccoli or asparagus, almost to the point of completion and then store them for later after blanching them in ice water. Then, when you sit down and order the Cedar Plank Salmon w/ Asparagus, the cooks in the back will throw a little olive oil and garlic in a pan before quickly sautéing the asparagus. The extra time in the pan takes the vegetable to the exact tenderness the cooks intended (see why the prep-staff didn't cook it all of the way?).

Makes total sense right? I mean the cooks can't be expected to boil a fresh pot of vegetables everytime an order is placed.

I did however learn the downside to this in my Food Sanitation class this week, which is that blanched vegetables are more susceptible to bacteria and other biological hazards.  I'm not sure how long blanched food is allowed to be in the refrigerator before it is deemed unsafe, but I will definitely ask in week 2. In the meantime, if anyone has experience in the matter and knows how long the food can safely be kept, feel free to post in the comments. I will make sure to do the same when I find an answer.