What does rancid hamburger smell like revisted….?
It most likely picked up freezer smell. Frozen meat doesn’t typically go rancid unless you had a major power failure and things in the freezer thawed and then froze again, or it was rancid before it was frozen. This actually happens more than we would like to think about, and is often masked by commercial butchers through the use of red dyes. Butchered meat is never naturally red by the time it gets to grocery stores. It’s only red when the animal is freshly slaughtered and there is oxygen in the tissue. Grocery store meat is naturally gray, which is unappetizing to consumers, so it’s injected with red dye to keep it looking fresh and tasty. Unfortunately it can sometimes also mask the appearance of meat that shouldn’t be on the shelf at all, and so sometimes we end up unknowingly buying rancid meat.
