I’d appreciate your opinions on a couple of food questions.
I’ve been ordering take-way from a local curry restaurant for decades.
Good quality, delivered promptly.
However now I’m in my sixties, I eat less.
So there’s usually a fair amount leftover.
I’d prefer to reheat that the next day, rather than throw it away. (Less waste - and better value too. )
My two orders are:
chicken tikka rogon (mild tomato-based curry) with vegetable rice
bombay aloo (spiced potato), mushroom bhajhi and vegetable rice
The food comes in sealed plastic containers.
My first question is how safe it would be to:
reseal the containers
store the food in the fridge overnight in the containers
reheat it all in a microwave* the next day
*My second question is that’s 800 MW power - so how long do I heat everything for?
As I live alone, I do NOT want to risk food poisoning.
This all seems perfectly normal and fine to me. I’m not even sure what the concern is here. Mrs. solost and I often get Thai curries to go, eat half, refrigerate and reheat the rest the next day. I wouldn’t reheat the meal in the plastic to-go container, I’d transfer it to something microwave-safe.
As for how long, I do a minute or two, stir, taste, and do another minute or two if needs it. I usually don’t do breakfast so I’m so hungry by lunchtime, I often eat it still mostly cold anyway
If you’re putting the leftovers in the fridge once you finish your meal, and then eating them the next day, then there shouldn’t be any food-safety issues from that.
Microwaving them in the carry-out container might be a problem, depending on the kind of plastic, but most restaurant carry-out containers these days are microwave-safe. Can you see a recycling symbol number on the container? Even if that is a problem, though, you could always transfer it to another container (yes, I know, that means washing more dishes. I’m a bachelor, too, I understand).
If the food is still hot when it arrives and you separate the portion you will eat then immediately refrigerate the rest it should be safe to eat the next day. Even the day after that, but I wouldn’t extend it further.
Resealing the container it comes in for refrigeration should also be just fine.
Like many others, I’d have more concerns about reheating in the microwave in a plastic container, but your most recent post indicates that’s not an issue as you are microwaving with microwave safe plates.
Heat, test, re-heat until you figure out the time needed for a particular portion size. I find best results if I spread leftovers in a relatively thin layer. If that’s not practical I’d heat, stir, and heat more to even out the re-warming.
If for some reason you have too much to eat at delivery, then finish off the next day you might be able to freeze portions, but I’m not sure how that would work. The food would be safe after a day thawing in the fridge and re-heating but freezing can alter texture. Just a thought, and maybe something you might want to experiment with. Or not.
Depending on how tender your stomach is, IME restaurant leftovers promptly refrigerated are usually healthy for 7-10 days but only appetizing for 5 to 7.
If you do have more leftovers than make a second meal, don’t reheat and re-fridge the leftover-leftovers. Instead serve out today’s serving of cold leaving the rest in the cold in the fridge, then heat the portion you intend to eat. And anything left on that plate goes in the trash.
Timing is always trial and error. Although once you get dialed in that, e.g., 2 minutes is enough for your typical curry, it’ll be two minutes every time. For reheating, the food is already as cooked as it needs to be. The reheating is solely about the subjective feel of hot vs cold vs barely warm food, it has nothing to do with food safety.
General comment on microwave reheating of anything: Using partial power for longer almost always produces a better = more evenly heated result than blasting on high briefly, whether that’s just once or is done twice with a stir between.
There’s widespread internet weirdness about ‘reheating rice’ - including:
People who claim that reheating rice is bad and will kill you
People who claim they leave cooked food (including rice) out overnight uncovered at room temperature and eat it the next day and they have always been totally fine
It’s a classic case of nuance being lost by people uncritically repeating something they heard, or misheard. In reality, it’s nothing to do with reheating rice. It’s about consuming cooked rice that wasn’t cooled and stored safely, allowing Bacillus cereus to grow on it, which produces toxins that cause food poisoning, and are not destroyed by reheating.
But as others have said - if you’re eating the meal when it’s hot and freshly cooked, and then refrigerating leftovers promptly after cooling them down, that’s pretty safe and normal.
if the container doesn’t seal well, then the food can dry out in the fridge
If the take away box is good container that seals reasonably well, then I’m sure it is fine to store the food in the fridge for multiple days. However, if the container doesn’t seal well, or barely even stays closed, then it is probably best to transfer the food to your own storage container that does seal.
If you have a problem with food going bad quickly, then it’s worth investing in a fridge thermometer to insure that your fridge is at the appropriate temperature.
I’m a believer that for a home kitchen if it does not smell bad, is not fuzzy, does not have the wrong color, and is not slimy, then it is probably safe to eat (unless it’s okra or something that is supposed to be all of those things). For me, the clock is not a good indicator of whether something is safe to eat.
If you want to keep the leftovers as long as possible, portion out what you plan to eat right away, and put the rest in the fridge before your enjoy your leisurely dinner. (If you eat quickly, ignore that, and just put whatever you didn’t eat in the fridge.)
Then, a day or two later, when you eat leftovers, only take out as much as you plan to eat.
Reheat until it’s a pleasant temp. It hasn’t been out long enough to need to be recooked.
How long food can sit out without going bad depends a bit on the temperature of your kitchen. Food actually spoils a lot faster at 25C than at 20C. And how long it will keep in the fridge depends a lot on the temp of your fridge, where cooler (down to almost freezing) is better. There are exceptions. Some “live” food (like some fruits and vegetables) keeps better a little warmer, but pretty much everything that’s been cooked keeps best when it’s colder.
But in any normal kitchen temp, and any working fridge, “eat half when it arrives, hot and fresh, put the rest in the fridge, and eat the rest tomorrow” is fine.
Agreed, and another bit of nuance missed is whether it is dry rice or mixed in some kind of sauce.
Because, I have reheated rice throughout my life, probably at least one meal a week is reheated rice, so I was surprised by all the online memes (including written by doctors) saying never to reheat rice and how dangerous it is.
But then I realized they probably were thinking of rice in some kind of sauce, or cooked badly (that is, still wet).
Wet rice does not last long at all – I’d say even 24 hours in the fridge is already pushing it, and don’t even think about touching any wet rice that was left out.
Meanwhile dry rice, made with a rice cooker or cooked on the stove until it is 100% dry to the touch, will last a few days in the fridge and it’s probably fine left out overnight if it was covered and in a room that was not too warm (IANA food safety expert, just saying my experience).
I refrigerate and reheat takeaways pretty much every time I have one. The takeaways around here usually only offer free delivery on orders over £20 or £25 which is too much to eat in one go.
Fun fact: Which way the microwave turntable turns is random, each time you run it. Motors that don’t care about which way they run are simpler and hence cheaper than motors that always run the same direction, but you don’t see them much because in most context, a motor is useless if you can’t control its direction. Microwave turntables are one of the few applications where you really don’t care, and so they use the cheaper motors.
