Yeah, as the question states… thanks for any answers.
If you put hot items in the freezer, it can damage the other frozen food by thawing it out.
While it’s a good idea to rapidly cool off food to be stored, placing very hot or boiling food in the refrigerator is generally not a good idea. The danger is in raising the temperatures of food already in the refrigerator to levels where bacteria will proliferate.
A better method is to fill your sink with water and ice and cool the pot off quickly, then refrigerate.
I don’t know if Pyrex or glassware is used much over there but I have broken a pie plate and a casserole dish by simply placing them on a cold surface straight from the oven. I would exercise caution putting one of them in ice water.
And I learnt to always place hot cookware onto wooden boards.
and try this helpful hint: if you’re going to store a lot of, say, soup, it will cool off a lot faster if you break it into smaller portions. To say nothing of the fact that it might be more convenient in furture to have smaller portions available to thaw.
and, by the way, the furture is pretty much the same thing as the future. :smack:
Another reason not to just stick hot stuff in the freezer is that you want to minimize the time your food spends in the “danger zone” where it’s warm and cozy for bacteria.
If you just stick a big pot of soup stock in the freezer on a plastic shelf, the heat can only leave the food by way of convection of the air and conduction through the shelf, both of which are much slower than conduction through the water in your sink. Water has a high specific heat, which means that it can suck up the heat and keep sucking while staying fairly cool. (Especially if you throw in some ice cubes.) This is why it does a quicker job cooling the food down than freezer air, even though the freezer air is at a colder temperature.
Add that to the concerns ChefGuy already voiced about raising the temperature of nearby food in the freezer.
It’s a good idea to cool your food quickly in an icewater bath, and put it into the freezer cold.
Unless the container is so hot that it melts or warps the shelf or rack, you won’t damage the refrigerator / freezer.