How to know when beef is bad after sell by date?

Yes

Bad meat gets slimy and tends to have a greenish tint.

If it looks like beef, feels to the touch like beef "should" (i.e. not slimy, sticky, etc.), and doesn't smell like feet and death, you're probably okay.

If it looks like CAD's dry aged steaks, you probably shouldn't eat it.

With meat, let your eyes and nose and fingers guide you and ignore the date the store put on the package. Your senses and your brain are finely tuned to detect putrefied meat and be repulsed by it. Just remember that some brown/grey coloring (ESPECIALLY in parts that might be covered and not as readily exposed to oxygen) is expected to occur in beef simply because of the way oxygen interacts with the proteins that are exposed at the meat's surface. You ever buy a pack of ground meat that's nice and pink/red in the meat case, but when you get it home, the middle's all grey/brown? The store didn't wrap old meat in a thin layer of new meat to fool you. It's just that the meat was ground some hours earlier and oxygen exposure tends to let oxygen bind to the myoglobin in the muscle, making oxymyoglobin. The eye sees oxymyoglobin as the red color that we've become ingrained to think is a sign of "good meat". The meat at the surface contacts plenty of oxygen, but the meat in the middle doesn't, so it starts changing to that brown/grey color. Luckily, that particular reaction has no real impact on food safety. In fact, the next time you come across well cooked rare to medium rare steak, pay attention to the meat when you cut it. If it wasn't cooked past the temperature that destroys myoglobin, you can often see this reaction happening when you cut a piece off the steak as the newly exposed meat in the middle can pick up oxygen and become brighter and redder.

So, getting away from the behavior of beef's proteins and how they act around oxygen, if it isn't rotten, proper cooking should destroy any pathogens on/in it unless you're storing it in some non-typical way that lets the real heat-resistant toxin producing nasties like botulinum grow.

In short, if a steak's been sitting in my fridge for a week, I'm cooking that bad boy if it doesn't look and smell off, but I'm not rolling the dice on steak tartare with something that's been sitting around that long just in case something like E. Coli has set up shop in it long enough to make undercooking a gamble.

Beef lasts a lot longer than chicken or pork. If it smells like beef it’s good.

How many pounds are we talking?

I’d eat it, as long as the cryopack or exterior packaging was intact and not,punctured or leaking. Don’t make steak tartare out of it and you should be fine in any long cooked dish. Remember those are sell by dates, not “ruined if not cooked by” dates.

You may make a few unexpected trips to the restroom but at least you didn't waste any money or meat. After all, there are starving people in Africa that would love to have your expired meat.

quote:

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Bought some chuck roast beef at Costco on 2/10. Didn't get a chance to make it when I wanted to and it's sat in the fridge in the original wrapping until today.

Sell by date was 2/13. Today's 2/16.

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That chuck roast that didn't sell by 2/13 is now the family value pack ground beef $1.89 lb. in the store.

put it on the counter and shine a flashlight on it.

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