I couldn’t find any previous posts, so here goes. After I’ve cooked white rice, should I store it immediately after cooking, i.e. warm, or let it cool first before storing? I keep getting different suggestions in Google, so let me turn to real experts in Cafe Society
sorry, meant conflicting advise.
Here’s a 1-page PDF that I think should be helpful.
You want to get the food down to refrigeration temp as quickly as possible.
Small portions and shallow containers help. We tend to have reusable ice packs in the freezer at all times and will often/usually stick one or three on top of a newly-refrigerated, too-warm container. Our fridge and freezer also have ‘super cool’ modes that help a lot.
Also, in winter, we have easy access to a cold garage floor (particularly nearest to the garage door) and/or back patio.
thank you for prompt response. stay warm 
Yeah, everything I’ve read says there’s some kind of spore that lives on rice kernels that’s heat resistant, so you really want to cool it down below the danger zone as fast as you can, before that stuff has a chance to germinate and grow.
If the only concern is food safety, cooling as fast as possible is always best for every sort of food.
Small containers put in the freezer & moved to fridge before freezing is best. But is almost certainly anal-retentive OCD overkill.
In the real world, some folks argue some foods benefit in texture or flavor with more gradual cooling. For rice particularly the formation of resistant starch is currently a semi-fad semi-real concern.
So why you’re making & storing excess rice may matter.
IME I make it my rice cooker, let it sit ignored a couple hours to sorta room temp while I enjoy my meal, my company, dessert and drink undisturbed, then put it into Tupperware into the fridge with zero regard for food safety or palatability. No sickness; tastes great a week later. YMMV, but IMO most of these concerns are tedious wankery.
thanks
For my family, we store it in the rice cooker so that it never cools. It has a display showing how many hours it’s been since cooking completed. A pot rarely lasts longer than 48 hours.
I’ve cooked maybe a million pounds of rice in my life. I put the leftover rice in a container, let it cool on the counter until the container is just warm to the touch, and put it in the refrigerator. I don’t worry about it too much, and I’ve never given myself food poisoning, to my knowledge.
I agree. After we’re done eating, the rice or any other food item goes into a container and then in the fridge. I’ve never quickly cooled down anything. And to really make your head spin, I thaw meat on the counter!! I’ve done it for over 40 years and have never had an issue.
I’m surprised with the cooties on uncooled rice there haven’t been massive outbreaks of food poisoning in Asian countries that have cooked rice for centuries. Maybe they cook just enough to eat up at one time?
In my experience, it is a good thing to remember that refrigeration can dehydrate food, and rice is one of those foods. If I’ve had rice in the fridge for a few days, I always add a little water to it before I warm it up slowly.
Screen name checks out.
If the rice is kept hot until it’s eaten (which is typical in Korea, for example) there’s no opportunity for spoilage. It’s very easy to do with modern electric rice cookers. Traditional pots over a fire work just as well. There’s even a soup made from adding water to the crispy rice at the edge of the pot.
Which makes leftover fridge rice perfect for making fried rice! 
Do we have a user @basmati ? If so, I want to hear them weigh in on this sticky matter. We need to get our info as fine-grained as possible!
Me, I leave rice on the counter and sometimes covered on the stove overnight with no death thus far.
I have always done so… I didn’t even know “leftover rice” was a concern until I heard @Mangetout mention it in a video on YouTube…
The weirdest thing is that so much of the opinion seems so polarised; it’s often either:
“OMG YOU SHOULD NEVER REHEAT RICE!”
or
“The problem doesn’t even exist”
Which strongly suggests that someone’s know-nothing malicious meme has gained traction with some gullible fraction of the public.
Yep. With the amount of leftover rice stored and reheated by Americans daily, if this was such an actual concern (OMG!! Leftover rice will kill you, it’s so dangerous!!) we would be seeing massive outbreaks of food poisoning/hospitalization and yet, somehow this factoid only seemed to spring into existence within the past couple years. Suddenly my father is nervous about how long to keep rice for, even though he’s been making rice and getting Chinese food for his entire life with zero ill effects, as has every person I know. 