how long is safe in fridge

[metropical]

I have made a 50/50 cook and raw and duck liver, with Alnutrin calcium as a new test.
1lb.
How long is safe in the fridge.
Although I suspect he could easily finish in 2 days, I'm going to walk him into DIY slowly.

 

[daftcat75]

I wouldn’t go past 2 days. I recommend portioning out what you made into either daily or per meal and freezing it all. My favorite way to do this was after mixing everything up, I would weigh out a meal or two into a plastic baggie and press it flat as I could before sealing it. This made it much quicker to thaw. If you can remember, you take out the next day’s meals from the freezer into the fridge the night before. And if you can’t, because you pressed the food flat in the baggie, it shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes under warm water to thaw it out and bring it up to an acceptable serving temperature. Other methods of portioning include small jars (which requires you to remember the night before to transfer to fridge or it will be quite a bit longer in a water bath to thaw it out), or ice cube trays. Once frozen into cubes, you can transfer those to a large freezer bag. Weigh a few cubes and take an average to know how many cubes are needed for a meal or a day’s portion. If you use bottle cubes (long skinny ice cube molds to make ice cubes that can be slipped into the mouth of a bottle), these can be broken and thawed in a baggie under warm water in case you forgot to thaw in the fridge the night before. (Sensing a theme?) Although I always wanted to remember to thaw the night before, that didn’t always happen. So making it easy for me to go from freezer to plate was a frequent goal of mine.

Since you have a partially cooked food already, you might use hot water to thaw and warm up the food. But you may mildly cook the food that’s coming in contact with the hot water through the baggie. This is probably not a huge risk. I’m probably overestimating the heat transfer here. But I always erred on the side of caution and never used more than lukewarm water (slightly cooler than you like your shower) with raw food. With canned food (eg leftovers from the fridge), those I would use hot water to warm up because it was already a cooked food.

 

[daftcat75]

You can (re)freeze what you have made now if you put the batch in the fridge without freezing it. But know that freezing only pauses bacteria growth/spoilage. It doesn’t kill or reverse it. If it’s been sitting in your fridge for a day, anything you thaw should be used in a day. A day of freshness has already been taken off its clock.

 

[daftcat75]

My three golden rules for raw feeding:

1. Don’t cook it. Always use a water bath and never the microwave for thawing/warming a portion to serving temperature.
2. Don’t leave a raw portion out for more than hour. Anything uneaten should be dumped and the plate should be picked up and washed after an hour.
3. Don’t feed anything from the fridge past two days. Maybe you can get a third day out of it. But I didn’t trust my own memory to keep track of its fridge age.

 

[metropical]

I wouldn’t go past 2 days. I recommend portioning out what you made into either daily or per meal and freezing it all. My favorite way to do this was after mixing everything up, I would weigh out a meal or two into a plastic baggie and press it flat as I could before sealing it. This made it much quicker to thaw.

great idea. exactly what I do with herbs. I had tried cubing the food and that worked ok. Even in a bag with cold water, it defrosts pretty fast. but flattened is much better. no microwave, so no issue there.

need to work out what his desired meal size is with raw/semi.
With the Tiki he's been eating, he can easily topple 12z a day. Hoping this will be a bit more filling as I think the fat content is higher.

don't have to worry about leaving it out. he's a vacuum.

 

[daftcat75]

don't have to worry about leaving it out. he's a vacuum.

Fur pig or not, you still want to wash the plate within the hour too. But from the sounds of it, that’s probably not an issue. I liked to feed Krista raw on the countertop so that any mess she made was on the counter instead of the floor and when she left the counter, I would pick up the clean plate and wash it in the sink.

She was going up there anyway. I just stopped fighting her on it. Easier to wipe my counters and wash my dishes than to teach a cat not to be a cat.

 

[metropical]

Owen is table fed, not that I want to, but like you said, can't teach a cat new tricks.
I wash 'em every meal.