LISTEN: What’s the best way to store beef in the freezer? A new study has the answer.

[00:00] Derico

The big thing that I’m hoping for in my research is we can improve the sustainability of the beef. Not just beef, but meat in general as well, because it is a very expensive product.

[00:13] Intro/Outro

Welcome to the Arkansas Food, Farms & Forests Podcast, the podcast bringing you the latest on food, fiber and forestry research from the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station, the research arm of the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture.

[00:28] Jenifer

Welcome to Food, Farms & Forests. I’m Jenifer Fouch. Today we are learning about food, more specifically meats and freezing and dry aging. To talk to us about this research is doctor Derico Setyabrata, assistant professor of meat science and muscle biology in the animal science department. Dr. Setyabrata, thank you so much for being here with us.

[00:51] Derico

Happy to be here. I’m excited to talk about my research and see what I can help you share and help out.

[00:57] Jenifer

Yeah, I’m sure we are going to learn a lot. And meat is something we are all, always interested in, food and anything we can consume, especially meats and dry aging, which has become a very popular topic as of late to and then freezing, which is something we all do all the time. And, to be honest, not quite sure if we’re doing it correctly. You know, “how long should I freeze this meat? Is it still good? Why does it look like that?” All of those things consumers have questions about. But you have a couple of research papers going on right now related to freezing meats and consumer perception and quality. Can you tell us about that study and what you’re looking into there?

[01:41] Derico

Yeah. Definitely. So, one of my current studies right now is funded by both the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and the Arkansas Beef Council as well. That study, we’re trying to focus on the impact of the different products, ice during the freezing. For a lot of people, now, instead of buying the precut products that you see in Walmart or something like that, they now are more comfortable purchasing, like, the big, actual whole muscle products—like the ones that you find in Sam’s Club and things like that. So whole loin, and they cut them themselves, or they just freeze the whole thing and then take care of it later on.

So we’re looking at the patterns. We’re trying to see, like, hey, is there any differences that could potentially impact those quality? We take a look at kind of like three different muscles—so your typical strip loin muscle, the sirloin, and then an eye of round—just trying to see, like, those are some of the common ones that consumers purchase, available for consumers, and see how different they are. All in all, what we see is, like, if you store it as a roast, or like a bigger section, usually the products maintain the quality a little bit better compared to steaks. But overall, not much of a difference. 

[02:56] Jenifer

So, when you take the steak out compared to the roast and you see the ice on it, it’s going to affect how it tastes and how it looks and our perception as consumers. But it doesn’t necessarily mean the meat is bad for you, right?

[03:12] Derico

No, definitely not. I mean, the overall, the product, it’s safe, it’s still safe. Flavor wise, even though like, the flavor is like, you know, like some from our consumer panel, it is lower. But it is still like on the same range. So like the consumer is giving like the steak about a score of 50 and then the section’s about like, or like the roast, it’s about 55.

So that’s fairly small. It’s not much of a difference. But there is a trend of that. So it’s something that oh maybe people need to be aware if they’re doing something with the steak, you can freeze your product as long as you freeze it properly and then you package it properly, you’ll probably be fine, and your product will still be good.

And freezer is still one of the best way to preserve your products. Definitely. I think right now a lot of the issues is, I think I’ve done it myself as well. When we buy something from a retail store, in the foam packaging, we just throw it in the freezer. That’s definitely the worst way to freeze our products, but that’s very easy, right? 

So, I think, additional steps, like if you have a vacuum packager at your at home, you vacuum pack it, I think that will definitely improve your quality, your frozen meat quality. Even if you move it into a Ziploc bag and try to remove as much air as possible, that already helps improving the potential quality of the products following the storage at that point.

[04:36] Jenifer

Repackaging it, taking it out of the package that you brought it home from the store, either a vacuum package that would be best, or a Ziploc. And how about how long? How long should you leave, say, a piece of steak in the in the fridge that would be ideal?

[04:50] Derico

If it’s done very properly, like the vacuum packaging, done well, your freezer’s pretty good, product usually, at least from some of the studies available, they are able to be stored frozen up to like a year, or sometimes two years. So, they are very much very good. 

But those are usually on the conditions that, you know, like they have a very good technology, they have very good freezers that are able to maintain that temperature well. A lot of the time for us as a consumers, we only have one freezer that also have everything else. So we open and close it all the time. And that actually causes a lot of issues because of the temperature fluctuations. So if you have your package, your product packaged right, I think that will help definitely with that temperature fluctuation. Still probably, I would say like even half a year or something like that probably is good. 

But then if you’re not packaging your meat properly, probably after a month or so, you’ll start a lot of, your meat product will have a lot of ice crystals around it. So you can see, once you see that there, it kind of shows that there are some already, like, quality, degradations from that just because from, like, the moisture from the ice crystals build up around it. So that’s probably some issues that are probably at that point, I will try to use that meat product as soon as possible. 

A lot of people have a separate chest freezer or like a frid—freezer that they use just to store frozen product, and they just probably open it once a week or something like that. For something like that, probably you can maintain your product quality a little bit longer. Not much of temperature fluctuations, and if there’s nothing inherently bad with your packaging or like from the beginning, I think your product will be okay to store it longer than six months, something like that.

[06:44] Jenifer

Another one of your research papers that is fairly recent, from 2024, has to do with dry aged beef trimmings in ground beef. Can you talk to us about that study specifically?  What were you trying to to find and then what did you find?

[07:01] Derico

So that study, it was part of my Ph.D. work. So for my Ph.D., I focused on dry aging. Pretty much tried to understand the whole process of it. So dry aging, just in case people don’t know, it’s a natural process to improve our meat. That was the only way to, we do, aging on meat, how we were able to improve the meat quality before we invented the vacuum packager for wet aging. So that’s the only way we do it. So it’s a traditional process. 

After the fact when packaging comes out, it kind of dies down. But then, what people realize, there are some flavor differences with the product. So they’re figuring out that those coming from the dry aging process. With that, though, we don’t actually have a lot of study that kind of explain the dry aging process. What’s important, what makes the flavor, how we can control this process? So as part of the study, we’re trying to figure that out. 

The big portions of the paper that was recently published was trying to figure out how to use the waste from dry aging. So from dry aging itself, usually there’s a lot of like, the surface becomes—dries out, and we have to trim them out. And those are usually not edible. 

There’s a couple reasons about it. Usually it’s very dry. On the other side, sometimes there are mold growth on it that make it hard for us to easily incorporate those trimmings into products. But other than that, when we’re cutting the products, there are some discolored area of the meat that are, still have the typical properties of meat, and we still have to trim them out. So those are the trims that we are using for this study. I have another study, separate one, that actually looked at the crust, the dried trimmings. And this one is just the regular lean trims. 

But both of the study, pretty much the idea is trying to find a way to reduce the waste from dry aging because it is an expensive process. And then the trimming process makes it even more expensive.

In the projects we include them into ground beef. So we are trying to take a look at the impacts of the lean itself. And also we have the fat portions that has to go gone through different dry aging methods. And then from there we combine them and we’re trying to see what kind of improvement we can see from the the final meat products. 

And from what we see, we did see there are some improvement with additional of the trimmings. It’s not a lot, but in this study we put, the trims and the fat. And then something interesting that we see from here is that the the lean portion is actually more important in potentially bringing out the dry aged flavor compared to the fat.

[09:48] Jenifer

How do you hope your research will impact the beef industry and consumer experiences?

[09:56] Derico

So I think the big thing that I’m hoping for my research, is we can improve the sustainability of the beef, or like not just beef, but meat in general as well, because it is a very expensive products. I mean, it is an expensive process. We have to take care of the animals, and there from that, we have the products, and we have to take care of the products. And then at that point there’s a lot of money and energy and efforts that’s been placed into the products. And then suddenly we miss the day, and then the product dicolored and we have to discount it or throw it away. So that is such a a sad condition. So I want to make sure I’m trying to focus on how we can improve that, not just helping for like the meat itself, but then the farmers, the beef producers, how we can help them as well.

[10:44] Jenifer

Yeah. Seeing how everything comes full circle and how everything is connected. That farm to table cycle. Dr. Setyabrata, I really appreciate your time and sharing your knowledge with us and your ongoing projects.

[10:56] Derico

Happy to do it. Happy to do it. Thank you.

[10:59] Jenifer

That was Dr. Setyabrata, assistant professor of meat science and muscle biology in the animal science department, talking to us about his latest research into meat freezing and dry aging. Thanks for listening. I’m Jenifer Fouch. Don’t forget to subscribe.

[11:16] Intro/Outro

The Arkansas Food, Farms & Forests Podcast is produced by the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station, the research arm of the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture. Visit aaes.uada.edu for more information.