How long can you leave milk or cheese out at room temperature without compromising health?
How about potato salad?
You can’t give a time limit - it’s not like after an hour, trillions of bacteria simply poof into existence. The longer it’s out, the larger the chance of getting sick.
Actually, cheese is usually OK. I can’t remember offhand whether it’s the pH or water activity that’s important there, but either way, bacteria really can’t grow in cheese. The only thing you have to worry about is mold, and they get visible pretty quickly.
Go to your local grocery store and ask the dairy guy. When I worked (as a teen) in a grocery store, the dairy department had this little chart showing how long various things lasted at various temperatures. I remember being a bit amazed that you could leave milk out in a 60-degree Fahrenheit environment for several hours with no harm done (according to this chart, anyway). Unfortunately, that was around 15 years ago, so I obviously don’t remember the exact data.
I ate a yogurt the other day after leaving it out accidentally for a few hours, and it was fine.
I think the situation at the grocery store is quite different from a typical home. At the store the products should still be unopened (sealed). At home, once a product is opened, it is exposed to the Fiendish Thingies and the lifetime goes down quickly. An extreme case is UHT milk. At the store it’s not even refrigerated and lasts “a while”. (Hmm, how long Google? 10 months!). But once opened, it needs to be treated at least as well as regular milk.
FtG
You can actually eat spoiled or curdled milk it won’t hurt you. It’ll gag you a lot though. My cat had a habbit of not drinking any milk until it curdled and then she drank the whey and ate the curds.
curdled milk = on it’s way to cheese
“curds and whey” are the first step to the cheese-making process
milk is artificially curdled in cheese-making
not only do I live in Wisconsin, but I am also descended from many dairy farmers.
Just seconding the bit about milk…
Apparently my great-gramma would take whole, unpasturized milk, cover the bucket with a towel, put the bucket in the hot attic for an unknown length of time (“A couple of weeks”, is what grampa says), then made some sort of cheese out of the resulting mess.
Of course, what do you expect from someone who came from Germany? They think rotted cabbage is a delicacy…
