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A few days ago, I seasoned some pork chops with salt and pepper to cook - but found the pan wasn't quite big enough for all of them, so I froze some instead.
Will my pork chops be safe to eat after being seasoned with salt and pepper and then frozen? Will it have an adverse effect on the flavor?
If they weren’t sitting out at room temperature for hours, they should be safe to cook and eat.
Salting meat too early can sometimes result in some strange texture problems, but it’s mostly a problem for ground meats, not slabs of meat.
If you had put it back into the fridge after salting and let it sit, it would’ve been a ‘dry brine’, which some people prefer.
If you want to minimize that effect, I would suggest looking at America’s Test Kitchen’s discussion of cooking steaks starting from frozen, and do something similar with your pork chops rather than thaw them out first.
Salting frozen meat does not do much. The dehydration of the meat cannot happen when the protein molecules are frozen solid. The movement of moisture between the protein strands can only happen if the meat is thawed.
