here are safe ways to store cooked food
- Scott Daniels: We Ate Well and Cheaply
- April 7, 2024
- 900
Some time ago a friend called in some distress. Her kitchen had become a smelly mess overnight, and she couldn’t figure out why. This is a person I had seen pulling dishes, glassware and serving pieces already clean from the cupboard and rewashing them before using them, so it wasn’t likely something had been forgotten and left to rot in the trash.
“I made a big batch of chicken soup last night and put it in the fridge, but now I open the fridge door and it smells awful.”
Ah. There’s the reason.
It seems many are unaware of the safe way to store cooked food, as the safe way can be counterintuitive. If you’ve just made a batch of something, making sure it’s cooked through, you just need to get it into a container and into the fridge, right? Not necessarily.
Doing so almost ensures bacteria will have an ideal growing medium to rapidly reproduce and spread. Once my friend’s soup was cooked, it needed to be cooled as rapidly as possible before capping and storing.
At least I thought so. Doing some research about this, I found there is all sorts of advice out there including some from the USDA that modifies the standard procedure most safe kitchens and restaurant facilities use. The key thing to keep in mind is you must avoid “the danger zone” in temperature. From 40-140 F, bacteria can reproduce very rapidly, leading to some serious food-borne illnesses. Food must be cooled below the danger zone within two hours to be safe. If you put small amounts of food into the fridge while still warm, it will cool to below 40 F fast enough. But a big pot of soup, a whole chicken, or a pot of stock or pan of bread stuffing will remain in that red light danger district for too long. It is best to separate that pot into small containers first.
You also can seal everything up in smaller containers and drop it into a scrupulously clean sink full of cold water and ice before storing. Use a kitchen thermometer to make sure things are cooling nicely.
As a side note, the same applies to freezing. You shouldn’t try to freeze hot food before it is cooled out of the danger zone, in part because large ice crystals may form, causing your food to become an unappetizing, mushy mess that tastes off and also may make you sick.
It used to be thought that putting hot food into the fridge would jeopardize foods already stored in there, but that is not the case. Your fridge can cool small amounts of warm food without warming the whole appliance inside due to a gallon of chicken stock warming things up. As far as I am able to learn, that’s an old kitchen myth.
If something isn’t fully cooled below 40 F within two hours, toss it.
One food that warrants particular care is cooked rice. I was surprised to learn day-old rice can make you quite ill. Uncooked, dry rice carries unavoidable spores that, once cooked and left in that danger zone, can really come alive and spread quickly, causing that nice bowl of leftover Chinese food to become toxic within 24 hours. Cooked rice should be eaten right away and tossed if it sits at room temperature for more than one hour. Even with safe handling and cooling, rice should not be saved for more than one or two days, which is a relief as you need day-old plain white rice to make good fried rice the next day. Actually, the USDA says four days is safe, but that seems foolhardy.
There are many safety rules for the kitchen that are worth your time to learn. I think we’re all cautious about keeping raw poultry well away from everything else, but some of the less known dangers can put your family at risk if you stumble along in ignorant bliss. A good place to start learning is www.foodsafety.gov.
I’ve eaten my friend’s chicken soup, and it’s amazingly good. It was kind of a drag to lose a whole batch like that, but it’s a good lesson learned.