Natalie Stanton

Yeah, okay, this has been such an interesting discussion so far.

So if we're going to cook food to then cool it down and have it another day, we need to make sure the food is thoroughly cooked through.

If we've got pieces of chicken, cutting into the thickest part, making sure that there's no pink, the juices are running clear.

If people do have a thermometer at home, like a digital probe thermometer, then they can use that.

In the UK, we would look for a core temperature of 70 degrees centigrade for two minutes or 75 degrees centigrade for 30 seconds.

Yeah, so we definitely don't want to be putting hot food into a fridge or a freezer because it raises the temperature of all of the other food that's in the unit.

In food safety, we talk about the danger zone, which is between 8 degrees centigrade and 63 degrees centigrade.

That's where bacteria can grow really, really quickly.

So foods that should be kept refrigerated, we call them high-risk foods, we need to minimize the amount of time they're within the danger zone.

So in terms of cooling food, we want to minimize the time the food is at room temperature.

We say maximum two hours.

So the quicker, the better.

And depending on the food, there's different ways because people might be thinking, well, how can we do this quickly?

So you can increase the surface area of the food.

So spread it out onto like a thin tray.

If it's something like cooked rice or pasta that's plain, you could run it under clean running water.

That will cool it down really quickly.

But maximum two hours and then into the fridge or the freezer.

So in the world of food safety, we would consider rice to be a high risk food because rice is associated with a bacteria called Bacillus cirrus.

And that particular bacteria in cooked rice has the ability to form what's called spores, which can mean the bacteria can survive heat.