Say I’ve got two roasted chickens in the fridge, but for some reason I haven’t felt much like eating chicken this week, and they’re still sitting there four days after I cooked them. In those four days, I’ve eaten a wing and a leg off one of them, snd now I realize that at least one chicken is going to go bad at this rate before I eat it .
The chickens were slightly underdone (a little pink in the breast meat) so if I were to pop one of them back in the oven, give it say 350 degrees for twenty-five minutes , what would that accomplish? (The breast meat would get overdone, but I can use that in chicken salad, so that’s fine.)
Does reheating throughly kill all the present bacteria in the chicken and the spoilage clock start all over again? Would the reheating accomplish little other than to make the chicken drier, but it would go bad at the same time as if I’d done nothing? Both of these extremes seem unikely to me, but equally so. What’s the straight dope?
Cooking food (if it reaches high enough temperatures) kills live food poisoning bacteria; if you do it for long enough, it should also break down the toxins they may have produced in the food, as well as (eventually) destroying any bacteria that have gone into dormant spore form.
However, after each time you cook the food, it spends a while in the ‘danger zone’ as it cools - where the temperature is not too hot for bacteria to live and not to cold for them to reproduce.
So the danger is that by repeated cooking/cooling cycles, you will accidentally omit to cook it for long enough to kill everything properly, then as it cools, you’ll allow the bacterial population to increase. That’s why it is only recommended to:
cook>eat
cook>chill>eat
cook>chill>reheat(thoroughly)>eat
You might get away with more heating/cooling cycles, but each time you do it, you’re increasing the risk that something will go wrong (not to mention making the food less palatable by overcooking it).
Well, yeah. I’m talking about thoroughly reheating the chicken. (I’ve found that it’s
fairly hard to overcook the dark meat, and the white meat in quite usable in chicken salad when it’s overcooked.) But if it’s going to be safe to eat if I’m willing to risk over-cooking it, then I’m better off doing that than I am just pitching the chicken out now.
I’ve heard of people who keep a pot of stew on a low flame for years, ladling out a bowlful when they want one, and adding ingredients and water every so often. Obviously, these people aren’t dying of food poisoning because the stew is simmering-hot constantly so there’s no bacteria even if some of the ingrediants are literally years-old at all times. If they turn the fire off, though, and it goes down to room temperature for a while, thus risking the growth of bacteria, is it sufficient that they reheat the stew to make it safe to eat? Logic says so, but there’s still something a lttle creepy about eating food that is years old that has gone through a reheating cycle.
Maybe it’s just me, and I’m feeling stupertitious.
I read about that years ago in the West Indies. They used to have a stew in what was called a pepperpot. After eating some of the meal was always left to start the next stew. When a daughter got married she took some of her mother’s pepperpot leftovers to start hers.
Sure; it’s possible, but a)heating it hot and long enough is likely to compromise the edibility and b)your initial comment about the chickens being slightly undercooked thew up caution flags in my mind; if you didn’t cook it enough the first time around, there could already be a problem and are you sure you’ll do it properly the second time?
I’ve heard of these too; it may that it only appears safe because nobody is ever going to tell you about the time they kept a pot of stew boiling for a week and after eating some, they died.
My concern with this would be that after such prolonged cooking, the remaining chemical sludge may actually contain compounds that are toxic.
Kind of a hijack, but in any thread like this, it’s worth including the usual food hygiene boilerplate:
Odour is not a reliable indicator that a food is safe to eat; it is possible for food to smell completely normal, yet contain dangerous populations of pathogenic bacteria, or their residual toxins; it is also possible for food to smell awful and in fact be safe to eat. The bacteria that cause food poisoning do not necessarily cause bad odours and the processes that cause bad odours are not necessarily unsafe.
[QUOTE=MangetoutOdour is not a reliable indicator that a food is safe to eat; it is possible for food to smell completely normal, yet contain dangerous populations of pathogenic bacteria, or their residual toxins[/QUOTE]
I had use for this at Christmas. My SIL left a chicken in the oven for 2 days, having cooked enough for an army on Christmas day. She thought it smelled fine and I quoted the SDMB. When she still looked dubious I asked her, “When you see articles about heaps of people contracting food poisoning from one source do you think every one of them smelled the food, thought ‘Gee that stinks’ but ate it anyway?”
There is of course a correlation between stinky food and unsafe food, because time and temperature tend to result in both; the correlation just isn’t anything like 100%, is all.
The toxins produced by some bacteria (Staphylococcus aureus, Clostridium botulinum (fewer than one of every 400 cases of food poisoning in the U.S, but caused death in approximately 30 percent of the cases), Enteropathogenic E. coli) are heat stable, and some bacterial spores are also heat resistant. Cite
A friend-of-a-friend heard of this tradition, and thought he’d try it for himself. However, he didn’t appreciate the importance of keeping the pot on a permanent simmer, and by way of a weeks worth of heating/cooling cycles he was able to give himself horrendous food poisoning.
As a general rule of thumb, never reheat food more than once.
Rather than another cycle of reheating and then re-cooling in the refrigerator, I would suggest moving one chicken from the refrigerator directly to the freezer. Much less chance for any bacteria to multiply that way.
You might consider taking the meat off the chicken, and cutting it up appropriately for sandwiches, chicken salad, etc. before freezing it. And then throw the chicken bones & some leftover meat right into a stewpot for chicken soup or stew.
It also depends on your personal habits and physiology. I don’t think I’ve had a bad case of food poisoning since I was a little kid, and I attribute it partly to luck, partly to the fact that I’m used to eating food that’s a little past it’s prime. I’ll eat beef, pork or fish that was left on the counter overnight after being cooked sometimes with no ill effects. I know I need to stop because my habits might kill me, but I hate letting food go to waste
It’s more readily observable on dogs. My vet in Russia insisted it’s fine to feed the dog beef that’s already starting to smell a little, and we fed Carrie such meat since she was a puppy. Of course, we tried to get her fresh meat, but when something is starting to turn better let the dog eat it than let it go to waste. She can eat anything and suffer no ill effects. Anything except processed dog food that is, which is upset tummy country.
Four days? Throw them out. Both of them. It’s already too long.
Either Dateline or 60 Minutes had a show on a while back where they cultured food in refrigerators to determine the bacteria count. A wide variety of cooked foods, including unpreserved meats, and even plain cooked pasta or rice, were simply not safe to eat after 3 days (72 hours). Many people apparently get mild food poisoning from food that is a bit spoiled, and never make the connection.
Anyway, I’ve used that as my rule ever since. If a refrigerated meal is not eaten within 72 hours, in the garbage it goes. I haven’t had an upset stomach from leftovers since.
Food can be in the “tempterature danger zone” (between 45 and 145, depending on your jurisdiction) for a total of four hours. That includes the time needed to defrost, prepare, cook, reheat, etc. Once you have exceeded 4 hours, you have to toss it. Many foods are good for up to 7 days in the reefer, most you shouldn’t keep longer than 3-4, as others have stated.
You CANNOT destroy some of the toxins produced by bacteria through reheating, unless you incinerate the food, making it inedible.
-CynicalGabe
Certfied (and certifiable!) food handler.
I simply have trouble understanding this. As far as I know it’s an ancient european hunting tradition to hang up your game in the sun for a couple of days to let it “ripen” to give it additional taste. I don’t know if people still do this, but they used to.
If it’s only good for 4 hours, how are europeans not extict then? Are you sure it’s not just individual sensitivities?
That’s still true today. Butchers will hang a carcus for a while – that’s where you get the best “aged beef”.
But that’s raw meat.
Probably being cooked, and then allowed to cool allows a temperature window that is encouraging to bacteria growth? I know my mother always said NOT to let meat cool on the counter, but to put it directly into the refrigerator so it cools quickly for storage.
