I was taught to let warm or hot foods cool off before putting left overs in the refridgerator. Why is that?

Question

I would love to find a dietician or nutritionist to pose this question to.

Answer 1

You let it cool off simply because it doesn't take so much energy to cool off. At least thirty percent of your electric bill is taken from your refrigerator. Letting the food cool off keeps the bills down. Also really hot dishes cause cracks in glass when cooled quickly.

Answer 2

This is true because you wrap the hot food before put it in the fridge so it take really long to get the food to cool down to the good temperature. And if its a really big quantity you have chance to damage the refrigerator. There is no problem to let food cool down in the room temperature as long as it don't take more then 3 hours to put it back in the fridge, let say 2 hour and half to be sure. But its more to prevent creating bacteria in the food and not really for damaging fridge Any good chef will tell you that.

Answer 3

You should put hot food directly into the fridge when ready. If you let food sit on the counter until it room temp or even above, you give bacteria time to grow and die. The life-cycle of many bacteria are very short. A couple of minutes in some. When they die they release the toxins which cause food sickness. When you take food immediately into the fridge you shorten the amount of time that food is sitting in the temp. range that the bacteria can grow in. While you will still have some growth, the amount of bacteria is substantially reduced.

If you are worried about heating up other foods in the fridge, place the hot food away from other foods....preferably on the bottom shelf though.

Answer 4

The reason I was given when growing up was that you did not want to make the hot food lower the overall temperature of the refrigerator but, other than that, I have put things piping hot into the fridge if I had to be away for any length of time and did not want to leave them out. It didn't hurt anything and no one got sick either.

Answer 5

A refrigerator is designed to keep cool foods cool, or to cool down foods that are room temperature. A container of hot food in the fridge radiates heat, which ends up warming everything else that is in your fridge. The fridge itself is not able to reduce the hot item's fast enough, so what you end up with is the food in your fridge being at a temperature at which bacteria can grow for far too long. Also, the energy expended in cooling down a hot item is huge, so you use a lot of electricity.

Now, for small containers of mostly solid food, this isn't such a big deal. There's not enough heat energy in them to make much of a difference, and leaving it at room temperature for too long can cause bacteria to grow in the food, so it's probably better to stick it in the fridge. However, for something like a big quantity of something - especially soup or broth or something else that is mostly water - it is a problem. Big quantities of watery food contain A LOT of heat energy, and it's actually best to rapidly cool them down in a big ice bath with running water before refrigeration.

Answer 6

There are two basic types of food-borne illness :
Food infection; which is the result of certain living organisms having a conflict of interest with your immune system . The greater the amount of organisms the greater the size of the conflict. The goal then is to keep the number of harmful organisms down to minimum. Sanitation textbooks refer to this as HAACCP which stands for Hazard Analysis And Critical Contol Point. Like most acrynoms ,that one is ugly, What it translates out to ,is this question: At what Point was it Critical that I correctly Analyzed And Controled the potential Hazard ?
All organisms require these six things in order to survive.
Food, Atmosphere[ aerobic or anorobic], Time , Temperature , A proper PH environment and Moisture , If those perfect conditions can be made less -than- perfect ,then control over microscopic organisms can be achieved,especially as it applies to food safety i.e
Dried fish -no moisture
Pickles-too much acid
Flash frozen Fish-too low a temp
rapid soup cooling- inadequate time
Vacuum packaging -atmosphere
proper dishwashing-denial of food
proper handwashing -keeps the bugs at bay
This brings me to the other type of foodborne illness :
Food Intoxication , is the result of certain organisms releasing toxins into your body as a result of their normal life and death.
The important dIstinction Is that unlike Food Infection, FOOD INTOXICATION CANNOT BE COOKED OUT!!! And since it remains with the food it becomes cumulative, The oft quoted rule of leaving food out for a max of four hours, represents the total time in the foods history that it an be in the danger zone.The clock does not re-set to Zero
when the food is once again below dangerzone temps.Rather it gets added to when it returns to the dangerzone.
Finally to get back to your problem, The temperature dangerzone is the area between 40 and 140 F that provides the best environment for organisms to thrive[ The powers that be periodically add or subtract a degree to see if we are paying attention]
The idea is to keep the time that your food spends in that zone to an absolute minimum and consequently the rule is heat rapidly and cool rapidly, Leaving warm food on a counter top or refigerator accomplishes neither because you are using air as the medium for heat transfer and air is horrible for this task. In both cases your food will spend much longer than need be in the Danger Zone and possibly endanger other food in your refrigerator. A normal refrigerator is usually around 35 -37 degrees which is only a couple of degrees shy of the danger zone .
Basic Thermodynamics :There is no such thing as cold only the absence of heat
To cool food rapidly you must by definition remove a lot of heat rapidly .To heat food rapidly you must of corse add a lot of heat rapidly.
If you place container or pot of hot/warm food in a sink full of ice water and stir often,adding ice as needed [ to the sink] until the temp is below 55 degrees you will accomplish this task. Then refrigerate it
If you have a tray of say lasagna - place in a sink full of ice or nestle into another larger ice filled pan, and allow to cool. Bus tubs are great for this
Remember the greater the surface area is when compared to volume the greater rate of heat transfer will be. In English : two shallow pans heat or cool faster than one deep pan

Answer 7

The reason that you let food cool off a bit before refridgertaion is to let the food cool so it wont heat up or break the fridge. You should, I deally, cool food to below 70 degrees in two hours, and down below 41 in four.....Thats the safe way to take care of food.

Answer 8

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Answer 9

I'm not a nutritionist, but I beleive it has to do with bacteria forming.

Answer 10

mainly because of condensation and food poisoning, and it warms the temperature of the fridge