Ceiling cat is watching you macerate

December 7, 2011 12:13 PM

Ancient ziplock bag of rum and raisins: still good?

I got enthusiastic about making a Christmas cake, oh, a month ago, and put a kilo of sultanas and raisins and a whole lot of rum in a zip lock, "Glad" branded ziplock food bag. Actually I did two bagsfull, baked and burnt the first cake, and gave up in despair. What do you think? A bag of sultanas at room temperature: fine. A bottle of rum at room temperature: fine. The mixture, marinating with pthalates and plasticides and whatever? (The Gladware site says that the bags don't contain BPA, pthalates or PVC) That's my question.
(I know it's late for baking the cake!)

posted by slightlybewildered to Food & Drink (9 answers total)

As to food-borne illness: you're fine. Distilled alcohol at those concentrations will kill bacteria many, many times over.

As to leeching nasty chemicals out of the bag: I don't know.
posted by gauche at 12:16 PM on December 7, 2011

Best answer: Yes, it's fine to use.

Title of the post FTW.
posted by Jon_Evil at 12:19 PM on December 7, 2011 [5 favorites]

Best answer: Wait, you did it for this Christmas? Sure!
Last Christmas, I'd still probably greenlight... the Christmas before might take some thought... but a month ago? Eat, eat!!

Those bags are designed as food storage bags that hold foods and liquids for months and months at room or freezer temperatures; questions about chemical leaching generally involve heating food in them or other high temperature things, and it's not even these particular bags that contain questionable chemicals. Stop fussing. Make a cake.
posted by aimedwander at 12:42 PM on December 7, 2011 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Raisins stay 'fresh' indefinitely in my kitchen. Raisins plus rum, I would imagine, would be even less likely to spoil.
posted by zippy at 12:46 PM on December 7, 2011

Best answer: When you said "ancient" I thought you meant several years old, and personally I would still at least try it. A month? For dried fruit and alcohol? You're fine.
posted by chickenmagazine at 1:12 PM on December 7, 2011

Best answer: This page - it's on the web, it must be true :-) - suggests that ziplock bags are not safe with alcohol. My instinct would be not to store spirits in any kind of plastic bag.
posted by epo at 1:22 PM on December 7, 2011

Best answer: In this case you're going to eat the raisins, not smoke them, so there's no telling whether the risk in epo's link applies. Eat!
posted by hermitosis at 1:59 PM on December 7, 2011 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thanks guys. I figured that if rum and raisins were in a jar they'd be fine forever, it's just the plastic bag. Besides, nobody actually eats fruit cake. Tempted to just eat them off a spoon!
posted by slightlybewildered at 7:47 PM on December 7, 2011

The reason that the DMT extraction is worried about plasticizers is because they would end up being concentrated in the final product. Anything that you leech out fo the bag would only be diluted into the final cake and would likely only be detectable with very sensitive analytical chemistry techniques.
posted by koolkat at 2:01 AM on December 8, 2011