Hello and thanks for tuning in to this week's nutrition diva podcast. I'm your host

Monica Reinagel and this week's topic came from Joe who wrote, I just came across some stakes in the freezer and parts of them look as if they've already been cooked. They were definitely raw when I put them in there. Is that what they call freezer burn? And are these stakes still safe to eat?

Yep, it sounds like you've got some freezer burned stakes on your hands, Joe. And yes, they are still perfectly safe to eat, assuming of course that they

were safe when you put them in the freezer and that you haven't had any power outages that might have caused

things to thaw. But the parts that look cooked probably

won't taste very good once those steaks have been thawed and then cooked for real.

I'd suggest thawing those steaks out and then cutting away the freezer-burned parts before you cook them.

But hey, steaks don't grow on trees, so let's be sure this doesn't happen again.

On the face of it, freezer burn seems sort of mysterious. How can raw food get cooked by sitting in the freezer.

Despite appearances, however, Joe's steaks have not been partially cooked.

To explain what's actually going on here,

I turned to Sabrina Steerwalt,

host of the Everyday Einstein podcast.

Thanks for joining me, Sabrina.

Thanks so much for having me.

So, Sabrina, can you explain the science behind freezer burn?

Well, freezer burn is the dehydration or removal of water from our frozen foods.

When the water molecules in food are frozen into ice crystals, those ice crystals will leave the food

surface in favor of the dry freezer air if that food is exposed to air.

The ice leaves via a process called sublimation. The molecules go directly from a solid, the ice, to a gas, water vapor.

So if you've missed a spot in your saran wrap coverage or you didn't get that lid on the ice cream all the way,

those foods will be more vulnerable to freezer burn.

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