What are the effects of freezing raw ground veal, steak & chicken tenderloins

Question

I'm trying to reduce my supermarket trips by buying multiple packets of meat and freezing them. I'm primarily planning to freeze ground veal, steak, and chicken tenderloins.

My main concerns are:

1. Will freezing affect the taste of these meats?
2. Currently, when I cook fresh meat, it takes me 3-4 days to finish eating it (storing in fridge). If I use frozen meat instead, I'll need to thaw it for 24 hours first. Will this thawing + 3-4 days of eating be safe? Or does frozen meat have a shorter cooked shelf life?
3. Have I missed any important considerations for freezing these specific types of meat? I hope these don't sound like 3 separate questions. As the title states, I want to broadly understand the effects of freezing for economic purposes.

Answer 1

1. Variable in the extreme. Vacuum packed and kept sufficiently cold there's little effect on flavor. Freezing itself has essentially no effect (other than slowing spoilage) on meat flavor (though certain upmarket vendors depend on people who think otherwise spending far more for allegedly "never frozen" product.) Processes related to freezing can have significant effects on color and flavor, particularly if the meat is loosely packaged or not in a sealed package, either of which promote loss of liquid from the meat resulting in "freezer burn" so called. In a loose sealed package the liquid is still in the package, as frost, and in a package that's not sealed the frost ends up elsewhere in the freezer. That effect is time sensitive, so short term freezing may not cause sufficient degradation to make an investment in vacuum sealing technology worthwhile; for longer term freezing it's essential to preserving quality - with no airspace in the package, frost does not form and liquid stays in the meat. Temperature variations in the freezer also affect degradation - a manual-defrost deep freezer that just stays cold all the time is much less prone to causing freezer burn in a similar timescale than an automatic defrost refrigerator-freezer that warms up regularly to melt its coils and remove frost, then cools down again. Even if it's always below freezing, there's a considerable difference in quality over time when the temperature is far below freezing rather than just barely below freezing, even some of the time.
2. It's wise to freeze portions based on what you eat, rather than what came in a package from the store (unless it was vacuum-packed and frozen before you bought it at the store.) However, in general if the meat was safe to cook when cooked, the "spoilage timer" resets when it's cooked, and would be the same at the end of cooking for meat frozen, thawed and cooked (properly) as for meat bought fresh and cooked (properly.)
3. How much freezer space you have available (or intend to purchase) .vs. your intended time between less frequent store trips, and whether that implies that you should consider adding the cost of vacuum sealing to the cost of your meat and the electricity to run the freezer in order to get good quality thawed meat at the end of your freezer storage time.