So, we rang in the new year recovering from food poisoning.
It’s somewhat of a mystery to me – that day we ate all home cooked leftovers, which, while a week old had been in the refrigerator the entire time. We ate the same stuff (squash soup) when fresh and it wasn’t contaminated then, and it literally went straight from pot to fridge when we were done. I am making an educated guess it was the soup, because that was dinner (around 6-7pm) and we got sick around 4am. The bread we’d already had earlier in the day and was a bit dry but not moldy; although the soup as well was not apparently bad – still looked, smelled, and tasted like it always does.
Anyway.
Can you get food poisoning from home made baked goods that are also about a week old, but when fresh caused no problems? Again, no mold, looks and smells fine, nothing obviously wrong with it. The leftovers were not meant to still be left-over, but to be eaten while I was away visiting family and not there to cook, but he opted for frozen pizza instead… That done, we’re not really in a position to waste food, either.
There’s only one piece of the gingerbread left, but I’d hate to throw it out if I don’t have to. Also, I have an intellectual curiosity if things baked to 350 degrees can develop bacteria afterward, somehow. It’s been covered (glass bake pan with a plastic snap-on lid) but on the counter. Also, how did the soup get contaminated? It was never left out at a happy temperature for bacteria growth.
Did you cool it fast enough? The FDA requires it to go from (off the top of my head) 140 to 40 degrees* in less then two hours. Between 140 and 40 is the “Danger Zone” at which bacteria multiply the fastest. In a food service setting we’re required to move it though that zone in less then two hours, but the faster we can do it the better. When I make soup at work. I take it off the burner, bag it up, heat seal the bag and toss it into an ice bath, then in the freezer. It cools very quickly. When I’m ready to serve it, I put the entire, sealed, frozen bag into boiling water until it’s about 160 degrees. It’s nice to know that the last time that soup was exposed to oxygen, it was near boiling.
When we cool soup that’s in a soup kettle that we’ll be using the next day, we put the entire kettle in a cooler with an ice wand in it so it’s getting cool air from the outside and from the middle.
You should also heat it from 40 back up to over 140 as quickly as possible for the same reasons. But if you get it up over 160, you should be safe.
The problem’s happen when people make something and then leave it out on the counter for a few hours so they don’t heat up their fridge and then the next day, warm it up on the stove until it’s warm enough to eat (about 150).
Anyways, if you make soup at home, I usually suggest cooling it off on the counter for 15 or 20 minutes, but stirring it every few minutes to get as much heat out as possible. Then moving it to the fridge with the lid off and stirring it every 10 minutes or so. Once the steam stops coming off it each time you stir it, then I feel comfortable putting the lid on. A big pot of chili, stuck in the fridge, with the lid on, will still be hot/warm in the center hours later.
*the “140-40” numbers seem to wander a bit each year, but it should be close to that, I didn’t look it up. I’ve seen it as 140, 135, 40, 41 and may some others all listed in there. But the goal is to move it from hot to cold as quickly as possible. Unless you’re running a HAACP kitchen, I wouldn’t worry about 1 degree.
What else did you eat during the course of the day? Did you eat anything store bought? Anything from a deli? If you did you might want to hit up your local health department, it should be free and you might find out that a bunch of other people got sick as well.
No, we basically didn’t leave the house that day and only ate what was on hand. I don’t remember exactly, but I think breakfast was coffee, cereal, and milk (all of which I’ve eaten since and have not gotten sick again), and lunch was cheese (which was new, he’d bought it a few days earlier) and bread (old, but again, dry, not moldy). He’d already eaten some of the cheese before I got home from holiday to no ill effect, so I don’t think it was that, either.
Maybe the soup didn’t cool fast enough, but we only had about two bowls worth left – maybe 3 cups – and I’ve put larger amounts in the fridge without having a problem. The soup went pretty much from being made (ending up at a simmer, so somewhere around 212 degrees), to going into a storage container to be brought to a potluck, traveling through below-freezing weather for about 20 minutes, and then most of it went back into a pot on our hosts’ stove while the remainder (the two bowls worth) went straight into their fridge. No one got sick from it that night, and we took the remainder straight from fridge, to freezing weather, to fridge. So… ?? Perhaps this is an unanswerable riddle.
Any thoughts on baked goods? I’d hate to throw perfectly good gingerbread away.
I don’t think you’ll get food poisoning from gingerbread. Cakes and bread don’t really support dangerous bacterial contamination AFAIK - they can go mouldy, but that’s usually obvious to the eyes (and mouldy bread won’t necessarily make you sick anyway).
When you say “week-old leftovers”, does that include the soup? I probably wouldn’t keep soup for as long as a week in the fridge - if it wasn’t going to get eaten within two or three days I’d freeze it instead.
Also you mention “baked goods” but to me that suggests bread, cake, rolls etc, which wouldn’t be kept in the fridge. Or was it just the gingerbread?
Things baked to 350 degrees can still be contaminated by bacteria after cooking. You wouldn’t cook a meat pie and then leave it on the counter, say, but I can’t imagine gingerbread being a problem.
Are you sure it was food poisoning and not a virus? There’s a lot of norovirus around this year, although I suppose that is unlikely if everybody suddenly got sick at the same time.
Good handling practices for food safety *minimize *risk of food borne illness, but they cannot eliminate it completely.
You did roll the dice eating something with a lot of surface area that was a week old. Even handled properly in terms of temperature, there are just lots and lots of places a single bacteria could have gotten hold and reproduced enough over the course of a week to make you sick. It’s part and parcel of being a soup. Refrigeration slows down most foodborne bacteria, but it doesn’t stop them entirely.
Cakes and breads are not generally considered very risky. The bacteria that make us sick mostly like to live in things like us: moist and warm. (Botulism being an exception, but there’s too much air in baked goods for botulism to be a real serious risk, unless you’ve made them with contaminated honey. But contaminated honey is much rarer than most people think.)
That being said, there’s been a horrendous and quick moving virus going around here. It appears to have an incubation period of only 1-2 days, so the whole family gets it more or less at once. It includes nausea and vomiting in its list of delightful symptoms (although I haven’t heard any diarrhea complaints, which is odd.) But it’s also got respiratory symptoms and an unusually persistent high temperature in everyone I’ve gotten report on.
Yes, I meant the soup. It wasn’t intended to be left in the fridge for a week. I left food for the SO to eat while I went up north to visit family for the holiday. Instead of eating what I left in the fridge for him, he forgot about it and bought pasta and frozen pizza instead. (I don’t know how you forget something that’s sitting right in front of you. Guess it’s a guy thing. He certainly opened the fridge that week. He put the cheese in there. And I did confirm with him that he had some cheese before I got home without getting sick, so that wasn’t the source.)
In any case, I expected the soup to be gone within a day or two after I left, which would have made it at most 3 days old. Had I known he wasn’t going to eat it, I probably would have made a point to eat it all before I left, or freeze it, or something.
Yeah, just the gingerbread. Also left for him to eat that week, which he forgot about. He managed to remember the cookies, though.
There was also regular multi-grain bread, but he left it uncovered on the counter the entire time so it’s too hard to eat now.
Pretty sure. I was in a completely different part of the country than he was until Thursday night, we stayed in Friday, and both started vomiting at around 4am Friday night/early Saturday morning. If we both got an identical virus from completely different places (and my family hasn’t mentioned getting sick, and given mom sent me a happy new year text I’m pretty sure she wasn’t), that would be a remarkable coincidence.
It also ran a course like I’d expect from food poisoning. We ate dinner, roughly 10 hours later we vomit, spend the next 10 hours dry heaving 3-4 times an hour along with diarrhea, and then the fever broke around 7-8 hours after that. No respiratory systems, just a major digestive system freak-out to get things out as fast and as thoroughly as possible.
(And now I’m paranoid about catching the stomach virus, too. :p)
" The soup went pretty much from being made (ending up at a simmer, so somewhere around 212 degrees), to going into a storage container to be brought to a potluck, traveling through below-freezing weather for about 20 minutes, and then most of it went back into a pot on our hosts’ stove while the remainder (the two bowls worth) went straight into their fridge. No one got sick from it that night, and we took the remainder straight from fridge, to freezing weather, to fridge. So… ?? Perhaps this is an unanswerable riddle. "
I’d say the soup got “inoculated” during the potluck, and then was given the opportunity to grow SLOWLY in the cold transport. Refrigerating or freezing doesn’t KILL bacterial growth, it only slows it down. And it sounds like you simply created a “perfect storm” for the bug.
If the soup contains cream, broth, or poultry, it is a lovely growth medium!
~VOW
A lot of what gets called ‘food poisoning’ is actually a viral gastro-enteritis picked up from being exposed to other people, not tainted food. The symptoms can come on like gang-busters, and whatever was eaten just before they occur gets blamed for causing the illness.
I’m NOT saying food poisoning isn’t a real illness; I treat a lot of that, too. But tend to suspect viruses, especially in cases simiar to what the OP describes.
The kicker in the OP is that the OP says “we” got sick. That tips the tables a bit more towards food being the causative agent. If the “we” in that case is just the OP and SO, then virus is still plausible. But if it’s a larger group who all ate the same stuff and all got sick shortly thereafter, it’s less likely to be viral.
Also know that even when food is the vector for the infection, it’s not necessarily the last food you ate. It may have been as many as 7 days earlier or more for some types of pathogens.
Also, it’s very rarely the food you ate 20 minutes earlier.
From time to time I’ll get people calling my store saying “My co-worker and I both just ate your fajita wraps for lunch (30 minutes ago) and we both have (some kind of sickness)…what are you going to do about this”.
Knowing that’s it’s pretty rare for food poisoning to cause you to vomit or void your bowels in liquid form less then an hour after eating, I usually act (not sarcastically) concerned and tell them they should go to the hospital and get checked out since I’m not qualified to tell them what to do over the phone. But I say this knowing that they probably won’t go to the hospital or that a doctor will tell them that it’s not the food they ate 15 minutes before they got sick but maybe the lunch or dinner they had together yesterday
The one time I said “Umm, ya sure it wasn’t just too spicy for you because if you got food poisoning you’d probably get sick tonight, not 15 minutes after you ate it” she wasn’t too happy with that response.
Well, it was just me and SO, but we were separated by some 300 miles for a week until about a day before we got sick, so unless I picked it up on the bus home, gave it to him, and we developed symptoms at exactly the same time (I threw up maybe 10 minutes before he did), I’m still thinking it was the soup.
The soup was vegan, no broth (mainly squash, onion, peanut butter, and spices). But that’s my best guess. Funnily enough, what we ate 7 days before we got sick was the soup, too, though thankfully none of my friends have mentioned getting sick. In fact they were all at the (second) party I missed while being sick.
I ate the last of the gingerbread with no ill effect, btw, which was the important part of this intellectual exercise. Damn good gingerbread if I do say so.
Soup is generally an ideal growth medium for many kinds of bacteria. What I often do is boil it up totally cover the pot and let it cool, covered, to room temperature, and then decant it into a refrigerated container. After skimming it, I usually freeze it. Some, maybe most, bacteria can certainly grow at refrigerator temperatures, but few, if any, can in the freezer.
That done, we’re not really in a position to waste food, either.
He certainly opened the fridge that week. He put the cheese in there. And I did confirm with him that he had some cheese before I got home without getting sick, so that wasn’t the source.)
Damn good gingerbread if I do say so.