Ok, so I work at a Wendys one day a week. I just got off shift, and we close at 1am. At 12am I put a whole bunch of patties down on the grill, so I could start cleaning it by 12:30, and be done by 1am. That way I can walk out the door.
Well…usually we have a rush at 12:40-12:59. Except tonight we didn’t.
At 1am, I still had 15 big patties, and 15 junior patties. We’re supposed to chop them up into chilli meat, but I said fuck that. This massive billionaire corporation won’t even let us take home the food we’re going to throw out anyways. So I said fuck them, and took roughly 30 patties that they weren’t going to throw out.
Now I’m at home with a dilemma. I’m not going to eat 30 patties in a week. So I put the small patties in 2 ziplock bags, and the big patties into 2 other ziplock bags. I put them in the fridge, but I’m wondering. Should I just put 3 of those bags in the freezer, and leave 1 in the fridge to eat throughout the week? Will the freezer bags have any issues? The meat is already cooked. I’d essentially just need to take out a bag, put it in the fridge, and by the next day I could put it in the microwave for a minute.
Is there any issue with doing that?
It would be fine as long as you don’t keep unthawing and refreezing them. Slight loss of flavor and texture from when it was fresh, but it will keep way longer than in the fridge.
And doesn’t Wendy’s freeze the left over patties to make the chili?
Not the patties. They chop them up into bits, put them into essentially a really big ziplock bag. Like 2 gallon ziplock.
Once they get put into the ziplock, I don’t know how they store it. I know they put a timestamp sticker on it, but I told my boss long ago “I am not downloading that piece of shit app onto my cell phone so it can spy on my during my 6 off days. I’ll chop the meat. I’ll put it in the ziplock, but after that, it’s all you.”
And that’s what I’ve been doing for a while now. Over the summer we had a surplus of meat. Like 18 extra boxes of meat that was going to expire in a week. We don’t have the business to justify that many boxes. I don’t know what they were thinking. So on my one day there, they had me non-stop cooking and chopping the meat. Apparently they had done this for 9 days straight. Just cooking like 40 patties at a time. For comparison, usually we have 4 big patties and 4 junior patties on the grill at any given time. During rush periods I go as high as 8 each. But I was told that by the end of it they had 287 bags of chilli meat…in the summer. We go through maybe 8 bags a week? But we’re also connected to other Wendys in the area. The owner owns like 7 different locations. So we spread that shit out to everyone. Hey, you want 40 bags of chilli meat in July? Uhhhh, no, not really…TOO BAD!!! TAKE THIS SHIT!!!
And that’s how I’m told that fiasco went down. I needed 2 showers that night. I was not ok. Forever unclean forever unclean!
But I don’t know if they put it in the cooler or the freezer. Or the crisper. Or the refrigerator. I’m going to rule out the ice machine. It seems impractical to store food at the bottom of an ice machine. Though theoretically, I can’t say I know they DON’T do that…I just highly doubt it.
I don’t know where they keep the chopped up chilli meat bags.
Yes, they freeze them first. Then boil them to thaw.