I'm genuinely curious what kind of flavor deterioration there is after 50K years.
Specifically, is there any difference at all between, say, meat frozen for 5 years vs. 50K years? Volatile flavor compounds degrade even in the freezer, but at a rate measured in months. So I'm genuinely wondering if there are any flavor compounds at all that degrade but take decades or centuries or even millenia to do so. Or textural changes.
> “Making neck steak didn’t sound like a very good idea,” Guthrie recalls. “But you know, what we could do is put a lot of vegetables and spices, and it wouldn’t be too bad.”
That kind of makes me sad -- I feel like the whole point should be to see what the meat tastes like by itself, with just salt.
If you cover it in strong spices and cook it in a stew, it might as well be any mystery cut of beef. Seems like it takes away everything unique from the experience at all, in terms of taste or texture.
Instead -- add a little salt, cook it low and slow in a sous vide, then a quick sear on the outside. Then you'll know what the ancient bison actually tastes like, without trying to cover it up. Shouldn't that be the point?
If you don't like it, then you don't like it, but at least you genuinely tried to taste it. And it might even be fine, not bad at all!
There are many people who eat mammoth every year, as it is an easily available food source if you are digging for tusks. It is said it tastes like very freezer-burned beef.
It sounds like a tiny number of people might have eaten mammoth in the 20th century, which while surprising in itself is quite far from many people eating it every year.
How can they be sure it didn't thaw and re-freeze multiple times over the past 50k years, making it possible that the bioproducts of pathogens could be present in the meat?
Compounded across 50k years, there's only a very, very, very tiny sliver of possible conditions where the meat was just barely thawed enough to be contaminated, but not enough to be simply entirely rotted away 49k+ years ago. If it exists to be frozen at all, it is virtually guaranteed to have been frozen the entire time. Another example of scaling being counterintuitive.
