I recently had a power outage in my area. It was more of a brown-out, but still bad enough. And it got me to thinking of something my mother used to say. If you keep the door to your refrigerator closed for 24 hours (resist the urge to peak!), your food should be alright. The lady who cleans my house swears by the same rule, and says it applies to the freezer too.
Now this is a very important question. Indeed, since food poisoning is a poss. outcome if incorrect, very much indeed. Is this true?
Thank you in advance to all who reply. And please, even though this is technically GQ, feel free to inject your opinion too.
If you resist the urge to peek your freezer should definitely be good 24 hours, possibly more if it’s relatively full. With the freezer stuff, if it’s still frozen you’re good.
Fridge stuff… More problematic. Last power outage with stuffed a big bad of ice into the fridge, basically transforming it into a giant upright cooler. I kept the vegees and cheese, but pitched the milk just to be on the safe side. Foods do vary in how quickly they go bad after all.
The USDA says only four hours for the fridge, not twenty four hours.
The USDA also says 24 hours for a half-empty freezer and 48 hours for a full freezer.
The USDA recommends using dry ice to keep the freezer and fridge colder for longer.
USDA - Keeping Food Safe During an Emergency
You may also find this useful:
Refrigerated Food and Power Outages: When to Save and When to Throw Out
The Red Cross has similar recommendations. They seem to be figuring that the fridge will stay below 40 deg F for about 2 hours, and then give a 2 hour safety window above 40 deg F (so they also end up at 4 hours).
The FDA has similar recommendations: http://www.fda.gov/food/resourcesforyou/consumers/ucm076881.htm
If you know a power outage may be coming (say, a hurricane is heading your way, for example) they recommend freezing jugs of water. When the power goes out, put the frozen water jugs in the fridge to help keep things cool. When the ice has melted you also have a source of good drinking water, which could be useful if your water supply goes out as well.
All of those sites use 40 deg F for the fridge and 0 deg F for the freezer. Anything that you can use to maintain those temperatures will extend the time. If you stuff your fridge full of ice and let it go for 24 hours, then measure the temperature with a digital thermometer once the power goes on and it’s less than 40 deg F, you’re good to go. You don’t need to toss anything. If it’s above 40 though, then you need to start tossing food, especially raw meat.
I have found that the classic chest freezer holds the cold much better - and my mom used to buy bags of ice and toss them into the freezer so it was always full - she bought meat in bulk from a local butcher a couple times a year, and tended to have a standard load out of frozen veggies she bought a few times a year.
We don’t worry all that much - other than milk, half and half and whatever we are thawing out to be cooked and some sliced meats for making sandwiches our fridge is mainly fruits and veggies, and condiments. I think right now if we needed to unpack everything that actually needs constant 40 degree F refrigeration we would have a fairly standard travel cooler of stuff [tonight is pasta and sauce and a big salad so no actual dead animal is in thawing] not to mention we have a generator that would handle the fridge just fine. [and in the winter we would pop the stuff that needed to be cold into a milk crate on the back deck into the locked storage bin.]
I am interested in a solar setup when we move to either Key West or Fresno Ca to ‘even out’ the electric billing and to pitch in whenever they decide to have a rolling brown out. I already run the televisions and computers with UPS and surge suppressors to help with the damned power spikes we currently get here. The way I feel, I would love to put a huge battery system in the basement, with one of the whole house surge suppressors I keep seeing on HGTV because the electric companies in the entire US seem to be getting less dependable all the time.
A lot would depend on the food item. Many common items we typically store in the fridge don’t require refrigeration, others have a long shelf life non-refrigerated, but that would depend on the food.
As soon as power goes out, the temperature starts to rise. As the temperature rises, bacteria become more active. It’s impossible to answer the question in terms of H hours, since the variables include:[ul][]The kind of food (density and chemical composition)[]The quality of insulation and door seals[]The ambient room temperature[]the quantity of food storedThe amount of bacteria to start (lower counts take longer to multiply)[/ul]
There seems to be a taboo against re-freezing food that has been thawed.
For example, I was visiting some friend when they suffered a longish power outage, and it was decided that we could cook and eat some frozen steaks that had partially thawed, but the rest would have to be discarded. They were aghast as my suggestion to re-freeze them - didn’t I know that this must never be done?
So is this valid? To what extent is re-frozen food actually dangerous?
Most of the problem with refreezing is due to texture changes; every time you freeze food, ice crystals form in cell walls and burst some. After a refreeze or two, that steak may not be so appealing.
Thawing also restarts the clock on bacterial growth, not to mention bacterial production of toxins, which freezing/cooking may not affect. It may not make you ill, but it adds uncertainty.
I probably would have taken the risk but with the awareness that at the very least, the texture would have been subpar.
There are two issues with refreezing food that has been frozen. Firstly, each defrosting process adds to the potential time that the temperature is in the “danger zone” for bacteria to grow. Secondly, freezing and refreezing tend to disrupt the cell structure of the food (due to the way ice crystals form) which as well as affecting the texture from an eating point of view, has also been shown to allow bacteria on the surface of meat (where it can easily be killed by cooking) to penetrate deeper into the meat where it might survive less-than-through cooking.
See a very old Snopes board link, for a random cite.
But as stated above, lots of the stuff in an average fridge doesn’t actually need to be refrigerated. Veggies? Certainly not. Cheese? Ask a Frenchman where he keeps his cheese. Even ham - ever been to a Spanish tapas bar?
Grind it and make meatballs, burgers, meatloaf, kebabs, chili … anything where it would get thoroughly cooked. No real texture to processed meats like that.
When our power went out in 1997 for a week, the fridge contents were a total loss, but we took all the meat from the freezer and made a huge stew, cooked it for hours, and then refroze most of it and ate the rest over a few days. We survived and it was delicious.
