Vinegar based hot sauces are basically immortal; I’ve had Tabasco that was like 10 years old before
Does it lose any of its hotness?
It separated out to half clear vinegar and half… Red
You had to shake it back together but if anything it was even hotter than usual. It was wild
I think heat typically intensifies over time: anecdotally, leftover hot food is always hotter a couple of days after it was freshly made
I have some spices that are probably pushing 15 years that are just fine.
i ate a pound of pistachios that were 30 years old, and couldnt stop eating them, so delicious.
That’s older than I am. That’s nuts.
I see what you did there 😉
Unless stored in some unusual way, the nut oils would almost certainly have been rancid. Not very healthy for you, but wouldn’t give you food poisoning. Salt can hide the taste of rancid oils.
yea i believe you. these were in a jar without a lid and were dusty. Gen-X kids are hardcore, especially when hungry and broke.
Gen-X kids are hardcore, especially when hungry and broke
Ah yes. I remember my 20s and 30s…sorta.
Actual food? Probably yogurt at like one or two months. It had been sealed up until then.
I’ve had table syrup that was at least 4 years past the expiration (it actually still had the aunt Jemima on the bottle is how old it was).
A few days ago I finished some baking powder and my partner brought a big bottle home and I was like “oh it’s okay that stuff doesn’t expire!” Then I looked at the previous container I had and found out it had, in fact, expired in 2017. Don’t think it affected my baking though.
I mostly just eat stuff without looking at the dates unless it smells bad or is moldy.
Syrup I always thought was like honey. It comes from tree sap and that can even be fermented.
Aunt Jemima be like “I’m still here, critics!”
This depends on the type of food.
Fresh meat? Don’t push it.
Tofu? What, is the bean curd going to curdle?
Tofu will go bad, it will turn sour and slimy. Or at least the soft tofu will. Pretty sure all tofu will be eventually.
There’s some mayonnaise in the fridge a couple years old I’ll use on sandwiches. After family holiday get togethers there’s always leftover ham or turkey, that’s about the only time I’ll use mayonnaise. Every year I’ll pull it out, look at the expiration date and make a choice. Go get a new jar that will only get a third used or live life on the edge and slather on the old stuff. I call it refrigerator roulette
Some brands of mayo actually say on the jar that you don’t need to refrigerate them. In the fridge, I’d probably keep that 2 or 3 times longer then the jar claims it should last.
That moment when mayonnaise is an instrument.
I’ve eaten pasta from a sealed, unopened bag that was 4 years past the date. The only difference I noticed was a few pieces breaking apart after cooking and it maybe cooked a tad faster.
Imagine a bag of minute pasta saying “warning, after expiration, pasta may cook in 59 seconds”.
“Reduce cooking time by 2 seconds for each month past expiration.”
I’ve had the opposite experience. The older the pasta, the longer it takes to cook. If it cooks faster, that suggests to me that it has absorbed water during storage, which allows harmful bacteria to grow and the pasta might actually be expired.
I think a lot of people are confusing the “best by” or “sell by” etc. dates on foods (in the USA anyway) with an “expiration” date. The only foods in the US that actually have expiration dates are infant formula. NO foods expire exactly on some arbitrary date stamped on the packaging. The dates are listed to give consumers an idea of when they should think about consuming the product, many with a large amount of useable time after the date printed.
Don’t believe me? Here is the USDA’s FSIS explanation of their own regulations.So you’re saying meat doesn’t have an expiration date?
In 2011 I was in an unfamiliar kitchen and had some porridge in the morning. I put some ground cinnamon on it that was in the cupboard and noticed that it was particularly good cinnamon, much more flavoursome than I was used to. I looked at the bottle again and it was the same brand I always use myself at home so I didn’t see why it should be so much better but I noticed that the although pretty similar the labelling seemed subtly different than I was used to. I looked at the expiry, it expired in 1986 and the label was different because they’d updated the design since. I don’t know why the 25 hear old cinnamon seemed to taste so extra good, I would have thought that if it wasn’t somehow rotten and sloiled it’d at least have lost basically all its potency but somehow it was super nice. I even had extra after this discovery.
Was it a certain brand? If nothing bad happened due to eating cinnamon older than I am, that’s amazing.
Maybe I should do this for my 25th birthday next month, celebrate with 25-year-old cinnamon that may have been born when I was.
Yeh it was Masterfoods ground cinnamon if I recall. It really defies intuition because things like nice aromatic spices should get progressively weaker flavoured over time. I feel compelled to say this may have been a freak occurrence and it’s probably unwise to seek out 25 year old spice.
It is very possible it was made with a different cinnamon.
There is cassia and ceylon cinnamons that have different flavor profiles.
I did learn of this difference many years later. To me the Ceylon kind is a nicer, though perhaps less strong a flavour and seemed more like whatever my brain has decided “cinnamony” should taste like, but cassia will give you a more obvious punch even if not quite as delicious. I wonder if at some point Masterfoods switched from Ceylon to Cassia.
I just used up a bag of dried dates that were a couple years past the date on the bag. They weren’t noticeably different from when new. (They went into something baked so also seemed less of a big deal.)
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I rarely press my luck either, though mostly because the fact I know how to use what I buy and buy what I use makes it so I’m not used to finding something that’s past an expiration date. It used to be (and this is still slightly the case) I had to be “urged” to be afraid of it by people who were amazed I’d happily take anything regardless of a date.
Pasta, 12 years. Yoghurt, 1 month.
I’m impressed in a way that anything could be good up to twelve years past the expiration date.
Dry and sealed, it can last decades. Honey can last centuries but will usually expire after 1 year for legal reasons.
I believe they have recovered honey from Egyptian tombs that was thousands of years old and still edible. From recollection the syrup is too viscous for bacteria to colonise.
Fun fact: If you collect mad honey (the term for honey contaminated by bees which have pollinated poisonous flowers), you can wait for the poison to expire.
I’m thinking about this and not sure but have made fruit syrups for cocktails, recipes said they last a week in the fridge, but still tasted great after a year. I always just use those until they are gone, but all I had were lost in the hurricane as we had no refrigeration for a week.
The 1kg Vegemite jar that was hand down to my by my father, and I hope to someday pass it down to my children when they are worthy
been drinking liquor, that “expired” in 1937
