I’ll take out what I think I’m going to eat, so it dethaws, etc… and too many times I’m so tired (and full) that I just go right to bed. Then when I wake up and go into the kitchen, I see food left out… Especially in the microwave. I hate throwing food away for so many reasons, and almost thought of throwing it back into the freezer, which I’ve done before, and haven’t had food poisoning yet. It’s been hours and I’m still so upset.
Depending on what you’re thawing out, a fast and safe way to do it is to put it in a pot (or bowl or whatever) of water so it’s submerged, put the pot in the sink and let cold water run over it and overflow into the drain. Most frozen stuff will thaw out much quicker than you’d expect when doing it that way and it’s considerably safer than leaving it on the counter. Also, when it comes to food safety, the running water method (slacking) is approved and very commonly used, leaving it on a counter, not so much.
At the risk of stating the obvious, the other option is to move it to the fridge, but that can often take day or two to thaw.
If you invest in a vacuum-sealer for food you freeze, like the kind you use for sous vide cooking, it makes thawing much easier later. You can just submerge in a container of cool water and it should thaw pretty quickly-- no need for constant running water. At the most, you might need to change out the water once.
I don’t have a vacuum sealer, but I’ve done ‘DIY’ vacuum sealing by putting the food in a ziplock freezer bag with the bag zipped closed around a straw. Then I draw the air air out with the straw by inhaling, and when I have a sufficiently good vacuum, I quickly remove the straw and close the last part of the zip seal. It works pretty well. It’s important to not have any air pockets because it insulates against the water thawing.
For that matter, it sounds like sous vide itself would work great for the OP; if they forget about it, it’ll still be ready to eat (and safe) whenever they get to it.
If you have overnight to wait, why not just thaw it in the refrigerator? I feel like I am missing a part of the story.
This is the second (at least) thread you’ve started about leaving food out overnight and still wanting to eat it.
Dude just throw it out. The risk of getting sick is not worth the couple bucks worth of whatever it is.
Thanks for browsing my posting history… And tells me its not a good idea to post what I really wanted to post elsewhere. I’m just ranting… I tried placing this under the most meaningless category, but it was moved… to avoid humiliation and cross examination.
Anyway, to answer your question, when you’re in dire poverty, you have no choice. I did throw it out, but I never do, and don’t remember food poisoning. Although that is NOTHING compared to what I’m going through inside.
Sound to me like the OP needs to invest in a timer that he can set to go off before going to bed or otherwise find some other type of reminder.
You’re the one asking for the same advice again, Eyebrows isn’t the bad guy for pointing it out so that you can re-read your old thread and we’re not all giving you the exact same info as last time.
Also, be it here or facebook or many other sites, I hate it when someone pulls the ‘how much time did you spend browsing my history to find that’ thing. Everyone seems to forget that we have a search function. These things take literal seconds to find, especially if the person remembers the old thread.
What are you talking about?
What question was that?
You stated in the OP that you’re so tired (and full) that you don’t put the food back in the fridge. I’ll accept that you get tired and forget about it, but you have can make some choice to avoid this in the future. Get a cheap kitchen timer. When you put food out to thaw, set the timer for a few hours, when it goes off, put the food in the fridge.
Similarly, you could put a note on your bed to remind yourself to put the food away.
The best method would be, if you can plan ahead an extra day or so, move the stuff to the fridge so it’s thawed by the time you’re ready to use it.
I’ve always found these rules about leaving food out a little confusing. The USDA and others say you should not leave out perishable foods for more than two hours, and my first thought is the number of times we’ve had pizza parties where the pizza stays out for a lot longer than that, and then we just box it up, stick it in the fridge, and then eat it for the rest of the week.
I can think of a fair number of other examples that revolve around holidays.
Your fridge must be a lot warmer than mine. Nothing thaws overnight. Well, maybe a very small thing. But I’ve had an individual portion of frozen goose still be frosty the next morning.
They include a margin of safety, and assume that your kitchen is warm, your food is highly perishable, and you might be feeding immune compromised people.
Which is to say, they are fine rules for a restaurant kitchen, where all those things are likely to be true. But they are way excessive for most of what you do at home. My kitchen is rarely warmer than 72F, even with the oven on. That pizza was approximately sterile when it came out of the pizza oven, and isn’t highly perishable. And your family probably all have robust immune systems.
Fun fact, temperature matters, and it’s not a sharp “safe zone”. Bacteria grow much more slowly at 65F than at 85F. And which bacteria matters, too. The odds of something really dangerous is much higher on raw meat and produce than on your cooked leftovers, assuming you are fairly careful about handling the raw stuff. (And yes, that includes raw fruits and veggies, which are picked by people who don’t always have access to the best sanitary facilities.)
That being said, if you did leave something on the counter to defrost, and then you get tired, you should pop it in the fridge before you go to bed.
Most of the food safety rules are intended for businesses that, if they end up with tainted food, is going to get a lot more people sick, so the rules are a bit stricter. However, I’m not sure how much leeway there is there. That is, if we (food industry businesses) are taught all our customers will die, right there in our dining room, if we give them some french fries that sat out for 2 hours and 1 minute, but maybe the actual number is more like 4 or 6 or 12 hours. But with literal lives on the line, as well as the risk of losing your business etc, we try to err on the side of caution when it comes to food safety.
There’s actually been updates to reflect that. When I took my first ServSafe class, you had to get food from 135* to 41 in less than two hours. Now it’s 155 to 70 in two hours, 70 to 41 in 4 hours. Luckily at my place, we don’t do that much cooling, but we still aim for 135-41 in two hours.
Coincidentally, I’ve spent the last 7 days refreshing the Servsafe website waiting for my exam results.
*Might not have been 135 back then, but it is now.
You could only say that if you’ve never had food poisoning.
I had food poisoning once. I’ve been through lots of things worse than that, some of them purely mental.
(It’s possible I’ve had it more than once, but I know it was food poisoning that time, because enough people had intestinal distress after that event that they researched it, and traced it to the fried chicken. Which hadn’t sat out all that long, as far as I know, I think it came bad from the shop.)
I use the sous vide for thawing food all the time. It works very well.
Except there’s no question in the OP. They don’t ask if it’s safe to eat. They’re just expressing their frustration at themselves.
It honestly sounds to me like a mini-rant, but the advice people are giving elevates it to an actual Cafe Society thread.
Here’s the habit I got into to avoid leaving thawing food out overnight:
Remove target food from freezer and put it in the refrigerator.
Next morning when I open the fridge to gather breakfast things, I see the partially-thawed package and then I take it out to thaw the rest of the way before dinner.
The only exception to this is a large whole chicken. I leave that in the fridge for 2 days before taking it out to thaw the rest of the way.
I find that so long as the main thawing occurs during the day and not overnight, I tend to the thawing food well enough.
This is approximately what i do, except leaving it out usually isn’t enough, and i end up doing the “drip water over it” trying to finish defrosting.
I’m suspecting my fridge is colder than “normal”. I like that it’s cold, because stuff keeps really well in it. But it doesn’t work well for defrosting.
Mine, either.
But then I keep my home temperature set to 63F, so I don’t really worry that much if a large item gets left out overnight – so long as it’s only overnight and not the whole prior day, too!
That was another thing… I kept it at 65, but until yesterday, I would put something over the vent, to save on heat… But my fridge needs replacing (landlord is being very slow) and so I cleared everything out so it wouldn’t be in the way…
I didn’t even pay for the food, which makes me extra guilty.
I’m going to share an account that I hope helps the OP and other Dopers.
We have a household of five right now, and we keep a stocked freezer pretty much all the time. Plenty of on-sale chicken breasts, chuck roasts, pork tenderloin, etc. in the freezer.
The problem sometimes is that we forget to defrost something in time to cook it for dinner. This is a common problem for many households, I am sure.
Just this past Friday night, I was supposed to leave out a chuck roast to defrost overnight so that it could go into a crock pot Saturday morning (to be ready for early-evening dinner). But, yep, I forgot to take the chuck roast out of the freezer Friday night.
My wife always looks askance at defrosting large cuts of meat in the microwave. If she’s cooking the meal, she won’t defrost anything in the microwave – she’ll just make something else altogether. But since I was going to be the one doing the chuck roast – and it was going to cook eight hours in the crock pot anyway – I figured I’d go ahead and defrost the 3.5-lb frozen roast in our microwave. I’ve had success defrosting ground meat (for bolognese) and chicken breasts (to cube for, say, butter chicken) in the past, so I figured “Why not?”
Using the defrost setting and punching in the weight of the meat, I pressed START. The microwave allotted about 35 minutes to the entire defrost process. I took it out about 10 minutes early because I wanted to avoid any semi-cooked corners/edges and I figured the crock pot would easily finish off the thawing. Afterwards, the roast went into the crock pot with our usual fixins.
The crock pot chuck roast came out fantastic – no different from if it had been thawed overnight. I don’t know the source of the conventional wisdom that defrosting in the microwave “doesn’t really work” … but I’m pretty confident at this point that the conventional wisdom on the matter is bunk.