What??? But it’s been outside of the refrigerator!!! It’s lethal!!!
Like all of this food here, just waiting to kill so many people.
Im usually pretty lax about this stuff, but two days is pushing it. I once got food poisoning from food that passed the smell test, but was left out a wee too long, so it’s not an experiment I care to retry. I’d probably still risk it after the better part of a day, but definitely not two.
Yes, because those types of environments are completely analogous for bacteria… Leave some beef broth out for a week and treat it the same as a tomato and see how you do.
Beef broth left overnight at 75F will smell “off”. At 65F it will probably smell okay, and I’d bring it to a boil before eating it. Beef broth is one of the fastest foods to spoil, in my experience. It certainly won’t last a week. Curry might be okay after two days, depending on what’s in it and how warm the kitchen was. At least, that’s my experience. But seriously, I’d recommend cooking it.
Yeah, broths I toss in a day. I’ve occasionally forgotten that I left a couple of chicken breasts in the pressure cooker until the next day (I make the meat for my dog and save the broth for myself), and even after 8-12 hours, it started smelling like something I did not want to eat, reboiled or not. I don’t even want to think what it’d be like after a week.
Obviously, you and the rest of us disagree. Anyone who follows your advice does so at their own risk. I wouldn’t take that risk. @Hi, Neighbor!, I sincerely hope you heed the advice of the majority here, and throw it out, if you haven’t done so already.
Agree completely. Except it does matter what temp the kitchen is. In the winter, it often looks and smells okay the next morning. In the summer, it can smell bad enough to be unpleasant to pour it down the drain.
OP, freezing kills many common parasites (worms), although home freezers aren’t usually cold enough to reliably do it. This is used commercially to make fish safer as sushi:
That may be what you were thinking of. Freezing temporarily deactivates common bacteria in food (they stop reproducing) but doesn’t kill them. It doesn’t do anything to toxins that may already have formed, either. There is no safety benefit to freezing food that is already contaminated.
This is a place that prides itself on “fighting ignorance”, isn’t it? Better safe than sorry: toss it, and make some more chilli.
Ignorance <> food poisoning. Food safety rules are written with safety margins, and lack detail.
The temperature of his kitchen counter is a key variable in this. If it’s 80F, the stuff is probably already nasty. If it’s 65F during the day, and 55F at night, it’s probably fine. The ph of the food matters, too, as does the concentration of salt and sugar and what spices are present.
But sure, if you throw it out, it certainly won’t give you food poisoning.
With that length of time, I don’t think that matters that much and, besides, it’s pretty unlikely the OP keeps their kitchen that cold.
I was trying to suggest the two extremes of normal home temps. 80F is pretty darn warm. I know people who keep their homes that cool during heating season.
Hi, Neighbor! hasn’t been back in more than 24 hours. I hope he didn’t eat the chili.
The “danger zone” is between 40°F. and 140° F. It doesn’t matter if it’s 65°or 80°. Food should not be left out between those temperatures for more than four hours.
If it was a few hours, that’s one thing, but two days is way too long. Throw it out. The meager reward from the fading probability that it’s OK is outweighed by the serious consequences if it isn’t, Just make some more.
FWIW, I know someone who ate a TV dinner that had been left out for two days–in a moment of absent-mindedness, they stuck it in the drawer of a filing cabinet instead of the break room refrigerator, then ate it anyway when they found it. They ended up in the hospital.with salmonella.
I’m sorry, but in the spirit of fighting ignorance I have to reply to this. The rules are written to be easy and unambiguous. But there’s a huge difference in how fast bacteria grow at 65F or 80F, and thus a huge difference in how dangerous the food is after how many hours.
Although I’ll concede that another day has passed, and I can’t imagine it’s still worth salvaging at this point.
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Besides it probably wouldn’t taste that great after sitting out for two days, at least not good enough to risk food poisoning.
There is margin in there. If it was 5 hours, that’s still fine (for home use, for commercial, not so much). I can’t find a good link, but the last time I took ServSafe, it indicated that you had an additional 2 hours to cool from 70-40.
Personally, at home, I would be comfortable eating anything that had been at room temperatures for less than 8ish hours, as long as room temp is relatively close to 70. Though I would not serve it to others, and would absolutely not sell it to customers.
2 days though, unless you keep your kitchen in the 40’s or below, you are looking at almost a certainty of unpleasantness. Ranging anywhere from some nausea to teen angel.
Smell just isn’t a reliable indicator (if it were, food poisoning would be pretty ratre) It’s one of my pet peeves that on this board, in threads like this, people repeatedly give the bad and counterfactual advice that smelling it will determine whether it is safe. It will not.
Also, it’s not even a useful test. Dogs can routinely and with impunity eat things that would land a human in hospital.