Nasty storm last night, all along the coast of ohio. Some places got it bad, apparently a big M from McDonalds crashed to the ground in Avon. My electricity was off (at least my fridge and the building, my lights stayed on, weird).
So my fridge was out for 5 hours. Should I throw things out? My bologna package, which had been opened? My eggs?
An unopened fridge in a relatively mild climate for 5 hours? You’re fine, no need to throw out anything.
If you were defrosting your fridge, you’d temporarily transfer the food to an insulated cooler. Well, that’s what the fridge itself is, even when it’s not running. Especially if you never opened the door while the power was out, there’s no reason to worry at all. Worst case scenario, your milk might go sour a little bit quicker than normal, and you’ll know that happened because it’ll taste bad. It still won’t be dangerous.
And your bologna and eggs don’t even need refrigeration at all.
A lot of the things we keep in the fridge really don’t need to be there. Condiments like ketchup, mustard, salad dressings, even mayonnaise are protected by their acidity. Mayonnaise gets yucky texture wise after opening but it is only really dangerous after it has been mixed into food, which dilutes the acidity, or gets contaminated by the knife or spoon that was used in the jar.
As Chronos noted, eggs really don’t need to be refrigerated, we just do it in the US because they are washed here and that takes some of the protective natural coating off.
My eggs, like those of just about everyone else in Britain, sit in a rack in the kitchen at room temperature and do so quite happily for a week or two before use.
I struggle to think of anything that I would throw out after 5 hours in an unplugged but unopened fridge, and I am fairly paranoid when it comes to food hygiene.
My eggs, like those of just about everyone else in Britain, sit in a rack in the kitchen at room temperature and do so quite happily for a week or two before use.
I struggle to think of anything that I would throw out after 5 hours in an unplugged but unopened fridge, and I am fairly paranoid when it comes to food hygiene.
I can’t think of any food that would go bad solely because it was in the refrigerator for five hours without power.
We had a tornado come through the area about a year ago, and we lost power for 10-11 hours. We made sure to not open the fridge or freezer while the power was out, and our food was fine afterwards. So I don’t believe the OP has anything to worry about as long as the door wasn’t opened.
If you don’t open the door to the fridge, it’s not likely to warm up enough for anything to count as not being refrigerated for that time. The general rule that I’ve heard is that you only really need to worry if power is out for more than 24 hours; the fridge itself is insulated, and all of the cold food in there will help keep it cold, it’s a lot like using a cooler.
I wondered about frozen food – because an unopened fridge should stay cool, because it is kept cool by the melting of the frozen food. So I looked to see what the official recommendations were.
And by golly! The default recommendation seems to be “just throw everything away”. Which I can see as a recommendation for a commercial kitchen, or a shop, but they are recommending throwing away fresh eggs that have been at 40F for two hours! Even for an aged-care facility that’s a pretty extreme rule.
We had a major windstorm a few years ago that badly damaged a power substation and power was out for more than two days. I didn’t open the fridge except that after about a day and a half I took some of the more valuable stuff in the freezer to a friend’s house. Despite that door-opening and removing a lot of material that was still frozen, two days after the outage the remaining stuff in the freezer was still frozen and the fridge section was still fairly cool. In the end, nothing got thrown out, IIRC. YMMV, but five hours should be nothing, as long as you absolutely minimize door-openings.
Your power was off for 5 hours? Your food should be fine, both refrigerated and frozen.
If you’re worried about your freezer, you can make a “thaw detector”: Take a small plastic container with a lid, and fill it with water. Freeze it, then put a penny on top, and then put the lid on and put it back in your freezer. If you have a power outage, let it run again to get back down to target temperature, and then look at the container. If the penny is still on top of the ice, your freezer never got above 0ºC, and you’re fine. If the penny is on the bottom, then you need to throw stuff out.