re: Putting hot food in the refrigerator

"Though it may go against your instincts, don’t put hot foods in the fridge immediately after cooking. This will cause the temperature of the refrigerator to rise, potentially making it hospitable to the spread of bacteria. The FDA recommends cooling foods to 70 degrees within the first two hours after cooking and 40 degrees within four hours after that. We stay within these guidelines by cooling food on the countertop for about an hour, until it reaches 80 to 90 degrees (food should be just warm to the touch), then transferring it to the fridge."

Cook's Illustrated: Avoiding the Temperature Danger Zone

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You might want to try reading what he said again.

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Nah, I'm good.

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Right now I have 5 gallons of chicken/sausage/okra gumbo cooking down on my stove and when done,

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by gumbo2176

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Checks out

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We do an ice bath on the outside and a sanitized 2 liter of frozen water inside large pots to cool quickly before we put them in the fridge.

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That's the best way to quick-chill so you can put stuff into the fridge without waiting an hour for the temp to drop. Dump ice into a clean sink, add some water, nestle the pot into it. Stir every 5-10 minutes, and it will cool quickly.

Transferring hot food into low, wide containers will also cool hot foods quickly...simple physics. Greater surface area equals faster cooling. A cylindrical pot put directly into the fridge cools quite slowly, no matter what your refrigerator is pumping out in terms of cool air. (Lord, did all of y'all graduate from LSU without taking any natural science courses?)

Anyway, you can buy ice paddles if you regularly cook multi-gallon pots of stuff...you freeze the water-filled paddle & then stick it into a deep pot and swish it around.

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We're talking about hot food added to the fridge raising existing items to an unsafe temperature? Did you take any comprehension courses?

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Yes--it's a pretty straightforward problem. Think of it as an equation: heat in PotX has a value, just as the (lack of) heat in Items A thru X have values. If the volume of PotX's heat is large enough (say, it's a big pot, or a medium pot that is especially heavy/high thermal mass), it can raise the ambient temp inside the fridge to an unsafe level for a prolonged period of time. The fridge's compressor will indeed pump out cold air at 100% capacity, but the cooling power of that volume of air will be insufficient to overcome the heat load of PotX. Thus, everything in the fridge will get too warm.

People often don't realize this situation occurs, b/c they stick the damn hot pot into the fridge and then go to bed. Despite compressor running constantly, fridge gets too warm for several hours, then finally, begins to cool back down to the "safe"/cool temp. You wake up in the AM, reach for the milk, and everything "feels" fine to you. So you don't think about the fridge contents as potentially compromised. But open the milk and it may very well have soured.

The hot pot itself isn't cooling very efficiently, either: depending on what's inside the pot, the edges may be cool while the center is still molten. This creates a gradient of cooler to warmer food inside the pot--meaning that the bulk of the food is in the "danger zone" between 140 degrees and 40 degrees.

All of this stuff is basic sanitation covered by culinary training (like ServSafe). People who practice poor sanitation make others sick. It's not about old wives (or husbands) tales. Yes, I know that we all leave food out too long, etc....but if you'll recall, a jambalaya fundraiser in Columbia, LA, sickened hundreds of people and killed at least one. LINK

You're caveating your arguement to make it work. Like I said in the original post, you cannot PRATICALLY raise the temperature inside the refrigerator enough to Materially change the temperature of the other items.

Can you do it, sure, but you'd have to be trung to to prove your point.

He's here because he can't argue with lnchbox on the OT

We are so lucky

It's also possible you're both wrong


:keanuwoahgif:

Hello everybody. My first time on the Food Board. I see that MingoNameO is just as much a prick here as he is on the OT.

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We do an ice bath on the outside and a sanitized 2 liter of frozen water inside large pots to cool quickly before we put them in the fridge.

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That's my MO. First, I drop my probe alarm thermometer into the pot and let it cool naturally on the stove until 150 degrees, right before it hits the danger zone. Then I put the full court press on it with as much cold as I can get to drop the pot cool enough to portion out and stash in the fridge/freezer. I salt down the icewater bath, too.

I use these things inside the pot. They're designed specifically for commercial kitchens to freeze and drop in a hot pot. The flutes increase the surface area to more rapidly cool the hot stuff. They also let you stir the pot periodically to distribute the heat evenly by just spinning the paddle. Plus, they go in the dishwasher between uses, then filled up and stored in the deep freezer until next use. As an added bonus, if the power goes out, they provide a lot of thermal mass in the freezer to keep things frozen longer.

I need two of those paddles and a sink full of icewater and I can take a few gallons of gumbo from simmering on the stove to 50 degrees and fridge ready in a couple of hours.