How to defrost meat without a microwave

For many people, the most common way to defrost meat is by putting it into the microwave and using the defrost setting. But what if you don’t have a microwave or your microwave might be broken and you’re waiting to get a new one? How can you defrost your meat safely without using a microwave?

There are a few ways to do this. Probably the easiest is to simply take the package of meat out of the freezer the night before and pop it in the refrigerator and let it thaw overnight and through the day until you need it for dinner time. The only downside to this is that if it is an exceptionally large package of meat, it might not get thoroughly thawed by the time dinner comes around. In these cases, you’ll need to take it out earlier the day before to put it into the refrigerator to thaw.

The second easiest way is to use hot water. You need to make sure your meat is completely sealed in plastic without any holes to allow water in  If you’re not sure if the supermarket packaging is totally solid, toss it into a Ziploc bag first and then squeeze the air out. Then fill a bowl with hot water and submerge the package of meat into the hot water to defrost it. Make a quicker, you can refill the bowl with hot water after 5 minutes or so.

It is not advised to defrost your meat sitting all day on the counter anymore. There’s a lot of food safety issues that can arise when you defrost meat this way, so it’s really important to defrost your meat using one of these above methods instead.

Also, do you make sure your meat is fully defrosted before you begin to cook with it? It might not cook completely through the middle if the centre is still frozen when you begin cooking it. Not all recipes have the length of time built into it to allow for meat that is mostly frozen to be cooked to a safe temperature. That said, there are some recipes that are specifically designed to use frozen meat instead of thawed meat, such as some slow cooker recipes. But you should consider that any recipes using meat requires that the meat needs to be thawed before using it.