What should I do with 10 lb of bacon frozen together?
August 25, 2016 10:47 AM   Subscribe

We had way too much bacon leftover from the fire department pancake breakfast and I came home with a 10 lb brick of frozen bacon. What do I do with this?

This 10 lb brick of frozen bacon is sitting in my freezer and I'm not sure what to do with it. It might even be 15 or 20lb, I'm not sure, I threw away the case and it is no longer marked. The bacon is sliced and layered on parchment paper. There's no good way to my knowledge to separate the layers of parchment paper without defrosting the entire brick. If there was, however, this might be the best approach.

Would it be okay to defrost the entire brick in my refrigerator and then freeze individual portions? If not, what do you suggest I do with this?
posted by masters2010 to Food & Drink (12 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: Yes, you can totally thaw and then freeze bacon again.

Also, what kind of crowd leaves 10# of uneaten bacon?!
posted by culfinglin at 10:52 AM on August 25, 2016 [7 favorites]


Best answer: I think you'd be okay with fridge-defrosting, followed by portioning and refreezing. The texture will take a hit, making the meat a little more mushy, but it won't be awful, and you may be able to pull it apart before it fully thaws, limiting the damage. You could also portion it and then throw the portions in the oven and pre-cook. Cooked bacon does fine in the freezer, reheats in the pan or the microwave (after thawing), and then you'll have a pot of liquid gold, i.e. a few years' worth of drippings.

I would also think dropping it on a concrete floor, still frozen, would help it separate by the parchment, though. Drop it while in plastic or something, like a heavy-duty garbage bag.
posted by Sunburnt at 10:53 AM on August 25, 2016


Best answer: I would take a very sharp knife and try to separate the parchment from the layer next to it. So what if you lose a few strips of bacon, you have 15 pounds of it.
posted by AugustWest at 10:57 AM on August 25, 2016 [1 favorite]


Best answer: If it were me, I'd settle in for a day of baking bacon and just.. cook it all. Then freeze the cooked strips for easy re-crisping and snacking purposes.
posted by ApathyGirl at 11:02 AM on August 25, 2016 [12 favorites]


If you do thaw it, I'd consider dicing some of it and refreezing (raw) in small recipe-appropriate packages. I lone not having to get raw bacon on my hands and my knife, but still being able to use a little bit of diced bacon to start a soup or a sauce.
posted by mercredi at 11:29 AM on August 25, 2016 [2 favorites]


recently saw a somewhat neat trick for dealing with separating bacon BEFORE you freeze it (so, for next time or if you go the route of re-freezing this bunch): take the thawed bacon usually laid in stacks of slightly offset strips and roll each slice, then place the rolled strips onto a sheet pan (they should look like tiny porcine cinnamon buns, basically) into the freezer until they are frozen solid and bag them up - that way you can take a couple slices out at a time to thaw without thawing and refreezing the whole package when you only need a few slices.
posted by Exceptional_Hubris at 11:32 AM on August 25, 2016 [5 favorites]


It won't be a huge hit to the quality of the final cooked bacon to defrost and refreeze. You probably won't even notice the difference. That said, you can probably partially defrost it and then separate the layers of paper.
posted by ssg at 11:59 AM on August 25, 2016


Taking a cue from my experience with smoking pork, I've taken to cooking bacon with the long slow method. Toss the whole chunk in the oven at 250°F, as it cooks you can just pull apart the layers, the parchment will be fine. Freeze the cooked bacon that you don't eat immediately in separate portions. When you want bacon, pull out the cooked bacon, crisp it in a frying pan, bingo.
posted by straw at 12:42 PM on August 25, 2016 [1 favorite]


Get a head-start on holiday gifts - Candied Bacon for all! You can start with cooked bacon.
posted by lizbunny at 1:00 PM on August 25, 2016 [1 favorite]


You also might try cutting it into chunks with a serrated blade, like a good bread knife, and then defrosting the smaller chunks as needed.
posted by humboldt32 at 1:19 PM on August 25, 2016


+1 for "Carve off a frozen chunk as-needed & cook directly from frozen", that's exactly how I do bacon these days.
posted by CrystalDave at 1:44 PM on August 25, 2016


Oh, if you do freeze it, raw or cooked, you need to wrap it-- I recommend wrapping in foil and then wrapping in plastic. Freezer funk aromas are usually fat-soluble aromas (because water-soluble aromas have a hard time moving around in the dry freezer environment), and so bacon will absorb freezer funk and it will funkify other items in the freezer it not wrapped and more wrapped.
posted by Sunburnt at 3:15 PM on August 25, 2016 [1 favorite]


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