When you cook soup, stock, or any other dish that you're planning to portion and store, do you immediately place it in the fridge or freezer? If you answer "yes," you may be increasing your risk of contracting a food-borne illness.
The food danger zone is from 140° F (60° C) to 40° F (4° C.) Cooked food should not remain in the danger zone for more than two hours; potentially dangerous foods such as raw meats/poultry, sushi, and dairy products should never be allowed to reach the danger zone temperatures. When foods reach this zone, they provide optimum breeding grounds for bacteria and other toxins that lead to food-borne illnesses. Never cool food at room temperature.
Simply adding hot food to a container and placing it in the fridge or freezer does not keep foods out of the danger zone because their environments aren't cold enough to quickly move food temperatures through the danger zone within the two-hour limit. Also, the temperature of the food will not be evenly safe; the food closer to the edges of the container will be out of the danger zone, but the food in the center of the container will remain in the danger zone and breed bacteria.
In order to cool food rapidly and evenly, you must place the food containers in an ice bath. It's quite a simple and non-messy process. Simply fill your sink (or a large bowl) with ice and cold water, and place your containers in the ice bath. The container should be level with the ice. Stir the food every 10 to 15 minutes to distribute the heat to the cold areas so the food cools down evenly. As the ice melts, drain the water a little bit and add more ice. Monitor the food with a thermometer.
Once your food has reached 40° F (4° C) it is now safe to put it in the fridge or freezer.
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Isn't this quite a bit of work to fend off something that isn't of much risk?
It's a pain in the tail to do this and my food safety training gave me four hours (I worked for Sodexho for a couple of years in college). I never bother.
Of course, I'm also the sort of person who eats raw cookie dough and has two plastic cutting boards for everything (washed in between uses, of course!) instead of one for meat, one for veggies...
I'll take my chances. This is way too much work.
This ice bath thing is a little much, but I try to use the container with the most surface area (low and flat) for storing food so that it gets colder faster.
In a cooking class a few years ago, I was taught never, ever to put hot food into a plastic container.
this is good to know. i'd like to add that i learned this lesson the hard way. i had been braising ribs in the oven at 350 for two hours and only let it sit and 'cool' for maybe an hour, probably less. it was late and we wanted to go to bed. not only did my husband get food poisoning from the ribs, but most of the food in the fridge went bad. they were so hot when they went in that it raised the overall temp too high.
the moral of that story is if you can't touch the pan without hot pads it has no business being in the fridge.
i hadn't heard of the ice bath trick, but i will happily employ it. thanks!
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I've never done this, and I don't plan on it. After cooking food, we let it cool on the kitchen counter until it's cool enough to the touch, then pack it up and put it in the fridge.
I also don't segregate cutting boards -- just soap & water between uses -- and am willing to try almost anything raw (ix-nay on raw poultry though).
FWIW, we've never had any home-cooked food related illnesses.
the only time i have need to cool things down before putting them away is when i make and freeze chicken stock, and since i tend to make a lot at once, i'd have to have my whole house filled with icy bowls. i don't even have that many bowls. i'll take my chances, given that i've just boiled the stock for quite a while.
I think a lot of this depends on what you are doing, stuff thats been boiled is essentially sterile and if you use a dish washer that more or less is too, unless you start touching it all over the inside. If you stick your fingers in the food or taste it after cooking with a used spoon then you are innoculating it and may have trouble depending on what microbes you carry but really I go straight from pan to freezer every time I cook and there have never been problems. The only times I've ever gotten sick from food is eating out.
I portion my leftovers out to cool, even stock (since I usually only need a few cups for each dish). Alton Brown did an episode where he submerged water bottles that had been filled with water and frozen into the stock pots, which had also been set into water baths.
I never knew this, thanks for the tip.
The New Cook
The item should never be in plastic, it should be in metal because it is a conductor, and plastic is an insulator. Also, food must go from 140 degrees to 70 degrees in two hours... then from 70 to 40 degrees in the second two hours of which can be in the refrigerator. The reason you don't put hot food in the fridge is because there is no way the fridge can cool it fast enough not to heat up the rest of the contents inside. Ice baths are generally just used for something that has to be cooled very quickly...for your own time constraints.
A much easier way to avoid most food-borne illness is just not to eat animal products.
(BTW, the original poster wanted the word "sashimi," not the word "sushi." Sashimi is raw fish, while sushi refers to that entire category of Japanese finger foods. We eat plenty of sushi, and ours never involves any meat. It wouldn't pose any more risk of food poisoning than any other configuration of rice or vegetables.)
i never do this and i don't have an ice maker. i wouldn't go out to buy bags of ice just to cool down my food.