Ingredients · Tinned meat
Tinned meatballs (in gravy)
How long it keeps
About 60 months unopened
Once opened, about 2 days, refrigerated.
Source (unopened): FoodKeeper (USDA), 111 Meat products, canned, 5 Years · https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/fsis-foodkeeper-data
Source (once opened): https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/how-to-chill-freeze-and-defrost-food-safely/how-to-chill-freeze-and-defrost-food-safely
What ends it. The food and the tin slowly react. That changes taste and texture rather than making it unsafe.
How to make it last longer
What tinned meatballs are good for
Tinned meatballs in gravy are a meal in a tin that improves a lot once you
stop treating them as one. The gravy is about half the tin and carries most of
the salt, so decide before you open it what it is for. Drained, the
meatballs brown in a hot pan and go into a tomato sauce, as in
meatballs with pasta and passata.
Kept, the gravy becomes the base of a stew, and needs no more salt.
Browning is the difference. Straight from the tin they are soft all the way
through; two or three minutes in hot oil, turned once, gives them a crust and
makes them taste like something that was cooked rather than reheated.
How long they keep
USDA FoodKeeper gives canned meat products five years unopened. Once open,
decant them, because the Food Standards Agency advises against storing food in
an opened tin (FSA), and treat the contents as cooked meat: in the
fridge for up to two days, or eaten at once if there is no fridge.
CoFID has no entry for tinned meatballs in gravy, so this page uses its
homemade pork and beef meatballs in tomato sauce, which is the nearest match it
holds. Treat the figures as a guide rather than a reading of the tin, and the
label as the authority on salt.
Storage
Cool, dark. The gravy is half the tin and most of the salt, so it is an ingredient rather than a meal: drain it and you have browned meat, keep it and you have the base of a sauce. Do not do both by accident.
The pack
- Typical UK size
- 410 g
- Weight packed
- 450 g
- Volume
- 420 ml
Computed from net weight and standard pack geometry, not weighed. Manufacturers publish net weight and nobody publishes packed weight or displaced volume, so this is an estimate and is labelled as one.
Per 100 g
Deliberately narrow. These are the five things a long-life diet
actually gets wrong, plus energy and protein. It is not a general
nutrition model and is not meant to be.
- Energy
- 123 kcal
- Protein
- 10 g
- Fibre
- 0.9 g
- Vitamin C
- 20 mg
- Vitamin A
- 57 µg
- Omega-3
- not measured
- Sodium
- 60 mg
Source: CoFID 2021, 19-613 Meatballs, pork and beef, in tomato sauce, homemade
1 recipe using tinned meatballs (in gravy)