Speaking from personal experience only, if you re-boil the stew you can safely eat it after 10 hours out on the counter in a reasonably clean, cool kitchen. A big part of that assessment relies on your kitchen being relatively clean. All kitchens are rife with bacteria but I’m talking about like having moldy foods laying around, open trash bags, dirty days-old dishes sitting in the sink, etc. in this type of environment - eat it at your own risk, even after re-boiling it. In other words the answer is almost entirely dependent on how much bacteria and what sorts, might have made their way into the pot after removing it from the boiler originally. (where it was for the most part sterile to start out.) As for the cooldown before refrigeration I totally understand this practice. For those of us that don’t have state of the art fridges, a large nearly-boiling pot of stew would spoil every other item in the fridge before it had time to cool down.
What kind of “personal experience” are we talking here? Is this something you did a couple of times (very small sample size, meaningless), or something you’ve done on a regular basis for years (larger sample size, potentially indicative of something)?
I included the disclaimer “speaking from personal experience only” to avoid having my post picked apart since the question is, even as admitted by the OP, pretty much unanswerable due to too many possible variables. Since you ask, yes on many occasions especially in my younger days as a poor, sloppy bachelor I have re-boiled soup or stew that sat on the stove all night, never having been refrigerated, and eaten it without negative consequences.
Go ahead and eat it. My policy is that if you can’t taste or smell anything off, it’s probably safe.
One of the things to keep in mind is that your soup is NOT an ideal starch/protein broth for growing bacteria. The tomatoes and vinegar are acidic, which retards bacterial growth. Salt retards bacterial growth. Pepper, garlic, onion and many herbs and spices all retard bacterial growth: Food Bacteria-Spice Survey Shows Why Some Cultures Like It Hot | ScienceDaily
Hmm, on second thought, that “might” should be a “probably”. If you get it boiling again, most pathogens will be killed. Still, there are some that can survive ordinary boiling, and there are plenty of toxins that will survive anything short of incineration (and then you wouldn’t be able to eat it, would you?).
A lot of the variation has to do with what pathogens ended up in the pot, and how many. Unless you practice sterile technique in your kitchen, “how many” will be greater than none. A single bacteria doubling eight times? Eh, a few hundred bacteria won’t produce enough toxins to make you sick, or get past your stomach, unless it’s one of the really nasty and rare strains out there.
Now, you’ve got staph on every bit of your skin, and that bacteria will produce a toxin that can’t be cooked away. Thus the importance for wearing gloves and washing hands in restaurants. Still, it’s a question of dosage…
Bacterial infections will take a day or two to show up. Bacterial toxins will show symptoms within a few hours.
I can’t speak for Crazyhorse, but I always make broth out of leftover turkey bones using the same basic procedure. I usually cook the turkey for dinner and we cut it up and start simmering the bones that night (with salt, pepper, onion, celery and carrot). I turn the burner off before I go to bed (keeping the lid closed) and leave it out until morning (8-10 hours later). My nighttime room temperature is 60-65 degrees. In the morning, I strain it, bag it and freeze it. I do this about five times a year and have been doing it for more than ten years.
I have done the same thing with soups and chile, but usually I’ll refrigerate those before I got to bed (since they’ve had time to cool down after dinner).
Bolding mine. That’s probably key. If you get the whole thing up to boiling, you’ve killed any pathogens, and if you keep the lid closed, you’re not inoculating your the broth with any bacteria. Dust is everywhere, and carries lots of bacteria, so when you open the lid you’re almost guaranteed to get some bit of contamination.
Food safety practices are really about keeping minimal (and inevitable) contamination from causing sickness.
Thanks for all your informative posts!
T+5’ 30" and I feel fine. I don’t suppose I should think I’m out of the woods just yet though. Hubris and all that.
10 quatloos on the newcomer!
Kinda relevant site: http://www.stilltasty.com/
Just to pick up on one point: odour is not a reliable indicator of food safety in terms of food poisoning pathogens. The things that make food unsafe aren’t always stinky and the things that make food stinky aren’t always unsafe.
True that they do tend to coincide, but there are enough cases where they don’t to make smell an untrustworthy measure of food safety.
When I was at university we used to make a big pot of chilli at the weekend, and leave it out on the (unlit) stove all week. Each day, we’d top it up with another tin of tomatoes or some beans or something, and a load of Tabasco, and boil it up for a while, then eat some and repeat the process the next day. By Friday there wouldn’t be much meat left, but what there was was a week old and had been reheated six times.
None of us ever got sick from that, oddly…
This may be a foolhardy way of thinking, but I tend to think, “what would great-great-great-great grandmother do?” That is, is this scenario likely to have occurred pre-refrigeration, and is it likely my genes survived it then? (Most of the early illness and death was due to contagious illness and fecal contamination, remember. I’m assuming you washed your hands 'tween bathroom and kitchen while cooking.) In this case, absolutely, yes. Stews were a very common way of cooking, and you’d cook some, set it on a counter, and the menfolk would come eat when they were done in the field. Overnight, it’d sit out, and in the morning you’d either eat more cold, heat it up a little and add some grain to it for gruel, or cut it into chunks and stick it in dough to make pasties from it. Nary a refrigerator in sight. Heck, in most of the world, the same thing still happens every day. They leave RICE out for hours in Asia, which the Food Police will tell you is ripe for contamination, being moist and full of surface area for bacterial growth.
So traditionally prepared foods, I’m often more likely to gamble on. Yogurt? Sure - there’s enough bacteria in there to inhibit pathogenic bacteria anyhow. Milk? Not so much. Cheese? Sure. Sausage? Of course! There are some foods which are themselves forms of short or long term preservation, and when we’re talking hours instead of days or weeks, I think we need not worry too much, despite what the FDA and USDA have to say about it. YMMV, of course.
Except putting something hot into the fridge is not only going to make the fridge work harder, it’s also going to warm the fridge’s contents to potentially unsafe levels for a while. That heat has to go somewhere, and normal home refrigerators aren’t powerful or quick enough to quickly chill hot stuff. Refrigerators are made for keeping cold stuff cold, not for making hot stuff hot. That’s what (extremely expensive) blast chillers are for.
A better solution is to get those re-freezable gel inserts (I always see them for water bottles) and drop them into the hot liquids you want to put in the fridge, wait until they get to a safer, manageable temperature, and then put it in the fridge.
:eek: That sounds absolutely horrible. Even forgetting the sanitary issues (and the fact that various toxins that can build in food aren’t destroyed by heat), it just *sounds *like a terrible-quality meal.
It certainly wasn’t haute cuisine, but strangely it tended to taste better as the week went on. Much like when you make a pot of chilli and freeze half, then reheat it later, it always tastes better.
But yeah, we were at university, four 19/20-year-old males sharing a house, and food wasn’t really a top priority… 
Let me make it clear that I’m not recommending this school of food hygiene. I’m actually usually rather fastidious about food hygiene and sell-by dates etc, as I am mildly emetophobic.
As a pessimist, I’d look at it like this:
- what would you pay not to have a bout of food poisoning?
- how much did the meal cost?
So I wouldn’t risk it.
I’ve eaten worse, and lived.
Re: putting leftovers into the fridge immediately - one of the relatively few good things about a Minnesota winter/much of fall and spring as well is that there is a huge freezer available at a moment’s notice, and doesn’t use up an erg of my household energy - put it out in the snow, and twenty minutes later it is flash-frozen.
Regards,
Shodan
If you had eaten worst and died, you wouldn’t have posted. 
I would, but only to zombie threads.
Regards,
Shodan