Bad quality meat? Unhygienic? Is this takeaway edible? 24 takeaway dishes reviewed

The New Year holiday is over and there are no elders at home to help with cooking. Are you lazy again and start ordering takeout?

For busy workers, it is extremely difficult to cook a meal for themselves every day.

It takes two hours to cook and five minutes to eat. I might as well just happily order takeout...

However, it is not easy to order a satisfactory takeout.

I was in a hurry to eat, so I ordered some stir-fried food, but it took an hour to arrive...

I wanted to eat something with a wok flavor, but ended up ordering a cooking bag...

This time, my dad’s review focused on cooking bags. We purchased 20 cooking bags with high sales on wholesale websites online, and then went to a large wholesale market in Hangzhou to buy 4 cooking bags.

Details of the 24 samples are as follows:

The sample fee for this evaluation is 2025.8 + the testing fee is 51570 (public price) = 53595.8 yuan

Are cooking bags clean? Are they made with low-quality meat? How can we tell? …

Now let’s enter the world of cooking bags together——

One of the reasons why we don’t want to eat cooking bags is that we think they are unclean. The media has reported that some unscrupulous workshops use low-quality meat to produce cooking bags, and the processing process is also very unhygienic.

First, let’s take a look at the safety and hygiene of meal packs. Can they be eaten?

The cooking packs I bought this time are basically "quick-frozen cooked products" and need to be frozen at -18℃ and boiled or microwaved before eating. Only the braised meat of No. 9 female Q is available at room temperature.

The national standard for quick-frozen prepared foods has the following microbial limit requirements:

We sent 24 meal kits to the laboratory for testing of total colony count, coliform bacteria, Staphylococcus aureus and Salmonella.

The levels of coliform bacteria, Staphylococcus aureus and Salmonella in the 24 meal packs all meet the national standards.

In terms of total colony count, the national standard stipulates that for 8 major categories of food, such as cooked meat products, cooked aquatic products, and cooked grain products, 5 samples shall be collected from the same batch, and the total colony count concentration in each sample shall not exceed 100,000 CFU/g. Only one sample is allowed to be between 10,000 and 100,000 CFU/g.

The results of dish No. 2 Y Yang's Kung Pao Chicken and No. 11 Chef H Ha's Black Pepper Beef were not satisfactory.

I wonder if the microbial situation puts you at ease?

The overall hygiene of the meal packs is good, but be sure to heat them thoroughly before eating. If you come across a product that gives you diarrhea, put it on the blacklist immediately.

The one-year shelf life of a cooking bag makes many people worried. Will it cause cancer like leftover food? Does it contain excessive nitrite?

Such an important indicator certainly was not missed in the Dad Review!

There have been some reports that the cooking packs use all kinds of low-quality meat, and the ribs have been stored for a year...

In order to understand the freshness of the meat in the meal packs, we asked the laboratory to test an indicator beyond the national standard - volatile basic nitrogen.

Volatile basic nitrogen refers to alkaline nitrogen-containing substances such as ammonia and amines produced by the decomposition of proteins in animal foods due to the action of enzymes and bacteria during the spoilage process. Such substances are volatile, and the higher their content, the more amino acids are destroyed.

Simply put, the higher the content, the less fresh the meat.

Swipe up and down to view the results

The detection values ​​of volatile basic nitrogen in 24 cooking bags ranged from 3.34 to 6.22 mg/100g.

The 2012 version of the standard for quick-frozen prepared foods does not specify requirements for volatile basic nitrogen indicators. Here we refer to the requirements for volatile basic nitrogen indicators in "GB 2707-2016 National Food Safety Standard Fresh (Frozen) Livestock and Poultry Products". The meat used in these meal packs is relatively fresh.

In order to serve food quickly, many takeout restaurants heat the meal packs by boiling them in water.

This brings up a new question: Is it safe to heat plastic bags in boiling water?

We originally wanted to help everyone arrange migration testing of packaging bags, but since we could not get clean, unused packaging bags and the laboratory did not accept samples that had already been used to pack vegetables, we had to find another way.

From industry insiders, we learned that the main materials of packaging bags are PP, CPP, CPE, etc., or a composite of several materials, such as NY/CPE, etc. As long as they meet the relevant national standards for food contact plastic products and are used under the recommended conditions, they will not harm human health.

For the fried kitchen players, the cooking bag is really fragrant and tastes better than what they make themselves.

When reviewing mutton skewers, we have seen many cases of "selling duck meat under the guise of mutton".

This time, when he saw the black pepper beef tenderloin and potato beef for a few dollars a bag, the technical researcher began to worry. They were so cheap, could they be pretending to be duck meat?

Fortunately, we sent 4 types of black pepper beef tenderloin and 3 types of potato beef meal packs for DNA testing, and cow DNA was detected in all of them.

Many of my friends are real carnivores, so what they care about is whether there is enough meat in the meal pack, and whether a lot of potatoes and carrots are put in to make up the number because it’s cheap.

To this end, we specifically picked out the meat from the meal packs and weighed them to see which meal pack was more substantial.

The minced meat of No. 9 and No. 10 braised pork is so fine that it is not difficult for our food researchers to choose.

In order to make the amount of meat look more intuitive, we also weighed the total weight of the cooking bag and calculated the proportion of meat in the cooking bag:

Swipe up and down to view the results

Friends who want to eat more meat can choose products with a higher meat content according to their taste preferences.

Can cooking kits really make dishes exactly the same as those made by chefs?

We invited 20 colleagues to the company to participate in the tasting of various meal packs and chef-cooked dishes. In order to make everyone happy, we also provided rice (to prevent work-related injuries due to obesity).

It has to be said that compared with dishes cooked by chefs, there is still a certain gap between cooking packs. After all, cooking packs also have to consider issues such as cost and long-term preservation.

But there are also some meal packs that have received rave reviews, and some friends who don’t cook often mistake them for freshly made meals by chefs.

These 3 cooking packs have received positive reviews from friends in terms of color, aroma, taste and shape——

After carefully reading the comments of friends and analyzing the ingredient list and nutritional composition table, the thoughtful editor also summarized the identification method of takeaway meal packages for everyone:

With the rapid development of technology today, it is difficult for us to avoid meal kits or various other types of pre-prepared dishes that only require simple processing and can be served on the table.

A meal package can be prepared in 30 seconds for takeout, allowing us to have a meal faster.

I hope that the results of this review will help you stop feeling anxious about eating meal packs.

Of course, you also have the right to say "no" to takeaway meal kits.

If you don't want to eat cooking packs, you can check the merchant information before ordering takeout, and try to avoid stores that show no dine-in seats and very small kitchen space in the pictures; avoid dishes that have a high rate of cooking packs, such as Taiwanese braised pork, curry chicken, etc.

When a meal package costs only a few dollars but increases to more than twenty dollars when it is delivered as takeout, we can also buy the meal packages ourselves and refuse to let the middlemen make a profit from the price difference.

You can buy your own meal pack and pair it with rice and green leafy vegetables to have a nutritionally balanced meal.

To be honest, what we reject is never the meal kits. What we really care about is that the takeaway shops use good-looking pictures to make us think that we are going to have a meal freshly made by a chef with a homely feel, but in the end what we get is just rice covered with meal kits.

We also don't want to see the owner of the fly restaurant that has been opened downstairs from our house for 10 years, who cooks seriously, but has to close the shop and change his business because the cost is higher than the meal kits.

As ordinary people, we just want to have a good meal. People in the workplace are called to a meeting before the takeaway they ordered arrives, and the meal is cold when they come back; mothers who take care of their children have to let their children eat well before they can have time to eat their own meal...

Don’t let your stomach down, eat well and reward yourself!

Editor | Tang Tang

Design | Damao

References:

[1] Zhang Jilong. The growth rate of meal kits exceeds 10%. It will take some time for them to enter households in the future [J]. China Food, 2021(01):75-79.

Eat well today!

Source: Dad Review