On when to refrigerate hot food
How long after cooking something should I wait to refrigerate it?
When I worked at a food processing plant I would arrive at 6 a.m. and do a facility walk-through to spit and pee in all the food (just kidding: to inspect equipment and prepare for the day’s production). One fine morning I discovered a 30-gallon pot of béchamel sitting in the main walk-in. This was odd. All of the walk-in refrigerators should have been empty. I pulled back the lid and a puff of buttery steam escaped. I exited the walk-in and called out into the twenty-thousand square-foot production floor. There was no answer.
Somebody had woken at dawn to make a 400-pound batch of macaroni and cheese. But who? I considered the options.
Option one: Sam the sous chef was getting stoned and pulling all-nighters again.
Option two: The béchamel had been prepared the afternoon before... and was still blazingly hot after more than 12 hours in the refrigerator.
If you guessed option two, you get an expired cookie. A pot of piping béchamel weighing more than a baby elephant will, in fact, take forever to cool in the refrigerator. An industrial stock pot could take days to fully cool. A big metal pot will do a great job of insulating its contents and this is no bueno because bacteria will grow as the food lingers in the “danger zone.”
That’s a lot of béchamel
There’s also a second issue with putting hot food straight into the fridge:
When you sock away a still-steaming Le Creuset full of béchamel, all that heat will quickly raise the temperature of your fridge. The condenser will start chugging away to restore the chill, but that could take hours. In the meantime, your fridge could be hovering at a subtropical 60º, which would encourage rapid bacteria growth and shorten the shelf-life of every single item.
Also, all that steam coming off your béchamel will eventually turn into fridge frost. There’s nothing wrong with fridge frost but I find it unsightly. I don’t know what to say, it’s just not who I am.
So: let your hot food cool off naturally on the countertop before you begin the “active cooling phase” (industry term!) in the refrigerator. But for how long? It’s easier to measure by temperature than time, but aim for 30-60 minutes of countertop cooling. The food should be somewhere between lukewarm and warm—definitely not steaming— when it goes in the fridge. If that’s not happening within an hour, try these tactics:
Transfer the food into smaller containers. If you’re parceling out meals for the upcoming week, this is a convenient time to make that happen.
Leave the cooked food uncovered. (It’s okay, you have my permission.)
If you’re cooling soup or stew or something thick, give it an occasional stir to release heat.
Oh, and if you’re wondering what happened to the massive pot of béchamel...we trashed it. There were 800 portions of mac & cheese going out that day. We couldn’t afford to make 800 people sick.
Me after I pilot some food out of the danger zone
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