Not sure it counts.
For my 30th birthday my father opened a bottle of 1878 Porto his father bought.
So it was 130 years old.
It was… Unreliable. Full taste, very sweet, much more liquorous than regular Porto. We drank it quickly, what was left was fully undrinkable only a few hours later, totally spoiled. But for half an our after being opened, it was truly the most amazing Porto I ever had.
It has been bottled before cars existed… Before electricity became widespread…
Really a lifetime experience.
Now its gone, but I keep the bottle for future storytelling.
Pasta that was four years past its date. Some pieces were a bit brittle and I think it went a little softer faster than what was usual but overall I didn’t notice any difference and I enjoyed it! 😃 Definitely don’t do this with already cooked pasta though! The pasta I had was raw and in a sealed bag.
I did a hamburger helper, probably 5 months ago, where the liquid cheese sauce was supposed to be white… but was more off white/sickly yellow… needless to say I only ate as much as I needed and threw the rest out. 😂
I did the best I could to support the ‘we don’t waste food in this house’ mantra. I’m sure it was fine, but i lost my appetite merely from the thought of it.
Oh good gosh I just about lost my appetite too reading this 😂 glad you were okay though!
I figured it’d be alright until the cheese came out a little off in color. Didn’t smell weird… but, I didn’t trust myself to ‘taste’ it, I wolfed down what I could stomach before I could taste it, and tossed the rest.
The shitty thing was that I had dedicated so much time to cooking everything else, once the cheese came out I had already invested too much in my sunk cost fallacy.
A guy I used to work with would put a discounted cause it’s about to go out of data’s salad on his van dashboard, in a [British] summer, leave it there for up to 6 weeks, then eat it.
I bought a cup of plain yogurt for some naan bread. However do to my natural laziness and the yogurt getting pushed to the back of the fridge I ended actually using it over a year past it’s expiration date. The yogurt looked fine, tasted fine (other than being very tangy) and ended up making some tasty naan bread.
Stale chips. About a week or two past their best by date. They are very chewy and gross. But since I didn’t wanna waste them or go to the store, I put olive oil on them and seasoning and put them in an air fryer for a few minutes. They were bomb. Now I do this with regular salted chips. Add olive oil, seasoning Parm cheese etc.
If we’re talking about ignoring a date printed on the package, salt. Dunno why it had a date printed on it at all.
If we’re talking about something that does eventually go bad, it would be some other spice that only rarely gets used, dunno which one though.
If we’re talking about something actually considered perishable, eggs.
Salt: in the ground for millions of years.
Mining company: dig that up and slap an expiry date on it
Same with (bottled) water. The same water that was around even before dinosaurs digested it, also has an expiration date. I assume it has to do with law: everything considered to be a food has to have an expiration date printed on it, no matter how ridiculous it seems.
Pasta, i think it was 10 years past expiration date. Packet was sealed and stored in a dry, cool dark cupboard. Once opened, it felt normal. After cooking, you could not feel any difference. It was Barilla.
Also, cookies. Dry cookies, like crackers. Expiration date was past, how much i don’t remember (years, anyway), but the cookies where just fine.
Same kitchen.
Do you mean a true expiration date, as in “this food is not safe to eat”, or just best by?
If it’s the first, I tend to trust my nose and eyes up to a point, depending on the type of food stuff that can grow things that will make my anus prolapse get treated more by the exact date than my nose, same with stuff that’s hospital bills in food form. If the date is up, that kind of stuff goes out even if I can’t detect anything off, because the risk/reward just isn’t favorable. Similarly, if my nose does pick up something off, idgaf what the date is, it gets trashed.
It does help that I’ve got creeping on 40 years of kitchen exposure and a damn sensitive nose.
But best by? Most of the time, a properly sealed container of something that was safe when it was put in the container can take weeks or months past the best by date, when unopened, to have a noticeable change in taste. Some stuff, particularly canned and freeze dried goods, you can sometimes open them years later and have no detectable difference from something freshly packaged. Obviously, it isn’t everything, since some stuff preserves better than others, but food safety isn’t usually affected at all.
You gotta be more careful with meats, as an example. It won’t necessarily spoil, but it goes tasteless and textureless before some other ingredients.
It really is a case by case basis though. Something like canned tomato soup? It’ll taste exactly the same for years. Something like minestrone, though, you go to to a year after best by and you’ll notice everything being extra mushy, and the flavor gets blander. Sometimes, even a few months past in that specific soup.
But freeze dried? I’ve never had anything freeze dried be worse over time if the package is still sealed. That’s kinda the point of freeze drying. If it does change, it’s on a scale of decades, assuming a good seal on the packaging.
Things like salt pork, there’s a fairly firm time limit on. Less so with pickled vegetables, though texture gets bad with some things. Regular dried meats, like jerky, unless it’s vacuum sealed, it’ll get kinda blah within a week or two of the best by date. Dried fruits, peppers that kind of thing can last years even without packaging. I had a big box of dried peppers that lasted like five years and the last chili I made with them was just as good as the first. Not a bit of difference in taste, texture, or heat level.
Worst thing I ever had that was past best by was deviled ham. I’m not even a fan of the stuff to begin with, but you wanna talk about something getting funky and even more sludgy, holy crap. It even smelled like vomit. Well more than usual lol.
Yoghurt about two weeks past (it was unopened previously)
Milk six days past
Red meat four days past (never frozen)
I can’t remember much else atm
There’s this brand of organic yogurt at my local shop that says “probably best before xx/xx/xxxx, but after that just lift the lid and have a sniff”
I think I remember 6 weeks as being absolutely fine once, and 3 weeks didn’t some other time.
Yogurt is always hit or miss for me, but for the most part we don’t use it that often, so I’d say my average time from open to scraping the bottom is around 4-5 weeks.
have a sniff
I just always do that instead of looking at dates on food. If it looks off, smells off, or tastes off I trash it (always checking in that order, of course). Seems fine, I eat it. Never had a problem doing that.
Well, never a food bourn illness problem. I had a big argument with a housemate about expired food. Shortly after she moved in, she promptly trashed any food that was any amount past expiration, and proudly informed me that she had cleaned out the fridge, saving me from eating pickles that were a whole 3 months past safe to eat. To be fair to her, half the things she trashed actually were bad, but the pickle jar went right back in the fridge. If you don’t want me eating pickles that have been in the trash, Amanda, then don’t throw out my perfectly good pickles! Good call on the bottle of ranch dressing though, I forgot that was in there and it looks nasty.
My mum had these dried chili flakes, which were a few years past their best-by date. And honestly, I couldn’t imagine these really going bad, so long as they remain dry. I mainly tasted some before throwing it into my food to test whether it even still tasted hot. But yeah, they were good.
Never quite knew what to do with these, when I still lived there, but that made me consider buying some. I cook with more veggies now, where the chili really hits the spot.
I have some spices that are probably pushing 10+ years old that are fine tossed, they’re probably just less flavorful than fresh ones.
…i ate a fifteen-year-old bag of craisins sunday night; they were good!..
(my bowels disagreed monday morning, though)
Some middle eastern brand of juice crystal mix. It’s kind of like Tang, in mango and guava flavours, and the containers are the size of coffee tins. I think it might have been expired when I bought it. It expired 4 years ago but I still drink it occasionally and don’t notice anything wrong.
Nutella two years past it’s date. Not sure why it held up, there’s a ton of reasons it should have gone bad… small miracle but people have made holidays over less.
The greatest - I don’t know. The most recent I used: I have this box of instant dark cocoa powder I bought around 5 years ago or so and it’s best before Sep 2023. I had a nice cup of hot cocoa with whiskey last night.
