Question: I took your advice and bought a couple of sale turkeys beforeThanksgiving. How long can a frozen turkey be stored without going bad?

Answer: We stock up on a large number of turkeys at Thanksgiving, too. Itprovides us with the least expensive poultry price of the year. About once eachmonth (except during the hotter summer months), we cook a turkey. We eat someof the meat that night and save the rest to be used in recipes made on ouronce-a-month cooking day.

We regularly store frozen turkeys for up toone year and notice no difference in taste or quality from the birds that areeaten right away. We talked to a former Navy chef, now working as a butcher,who said that while in the military, they would routinely ship out for 18months. Sometimes they stowed two years’ worth of Thanksgiving turkeys onboardin deep freezers. Turkey that is vacuum-sealed in heavy plastic and then frozencan be stored indefinitely. This same rule applies to other vacuum-sealedmeats. Meat frozen in Styrofoam trays with thin plastic wrap should either berepackaged or eaten much sooner.