I have some spices that are probably pushing 15 years that are just fine.
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!”
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 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.
This depends on the type of food.
Fresh meat? Don’t push it.
Tofu? What, is the bean curd going to curdle?
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?
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.)
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 found oatmeal from 2001 in the pantry a few months ago and it was still good so I ate it.
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.
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.
About 15 years. I can’t remember exactly… something from the “small things corner” of our fridge :)
I haven’t even had a fridge last that long.
Oh. You poor slave to consumption.
What do you mean?
I’d hazard a guess that they’re just taking pity on you for not having an older fridge. Many appliances made 25+ years ago are still working just fine, perhaps with a bit of maintenance, but nothing made in this century is built to last.
My mom’s fridge is over 30 years old, as are her washer and dryer, and all three are just chugging along like champs. My refrigerator is just about 25 years old and the only thing wrong with it is the gasket on the lower door needs to be replaced soon.
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
Rice, 10 years. Beef, hmmmmmmm 2 months? Mushrooms at least a year. Got to let them be fun guys.
The kind of mushrooms from the grocery store or the kind of mushrooms likely secretly sold under the grocery store?
Buttermilk always seems to have like a one week expiration, but always seems to be fine up to maybe 2 months surprisingly
Assuming it’s cultured buttermilk, you can keep it going by adding milk when it’s almost gone, then leaving it on the counter overnight. It’s like yogurt but more robust, less fussy.
