Food Hygiene question: when can I put hot food in the fridge?

Technically, you can put hot food straight in the fridge off the griddle, but that would be inefficient and cause the compressor motor in your fridge to over-work/over-heat/fail. It would also raise the ambient temperature inside the fridge, possibly causing other foods to spoil.

Best wait until the food is at room temperature and you can hold it safely. You can speed this cooling by placing the dish on a metal surface, or in an air current - by an open window, for example. (Shield it from the possibility of insect attack, of course)

Always keep ANY food stored in the fridge covered or otherwise sealed - this limits or prevents simple spillages and cross-contamination of smells with other foods and drinks stored inside.

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You should never put hot food in your refrigerator

First of all it take forever too cool and get out of what's called the Food Temperature Danger Zone

which is regarded as between 40-140F although some municipalities move that number around a little bit .[covered foods will take longer to cool and therefore remain in the TDZ longer]The TDZ is the temperature at which bacteria most rapidly multiply at .The idea is to keep the total time in the TDZ at under 4 hours .There's one little problem with that ;time in the TDZ is

cumulative,It's entirely possible to have food in the TDZ for an hour get it out of the TDZ for another hour ,return it to the TDZ for an hour and think that you have 3 hour to play with .You don't:You have two hours to play with

Another reason not to refrigerate hot food is that it warms up your refrigerator which jeopardizes other products in there

Assuming that you don't own a blast chiller the best way to get food down to temp is in an ice water bath .If you can quickly reach 60F then your gonna be safe when you refrigerate it

Your actual product will determine it's relative safety or danger. An acidic product like a marinara sauce could be left to chill on a counter top wheras a high protein product like a fresh made chicken stock has to placed in a ice water bath and stirred

In addition to TDZ you may also want to look up

HACCP and F.A.T.-T.O.M.

Tdz Food

in my family...

we don't put boiling, exploding, flaming food in the fridge lol but we don't usually wait for a million years for it too cool either...

this one website that i once read said that its best to wrap already cold things before storing in the fridge and putting warm things in without wrappers and when it has coolen, put a wrapper on

you don't want to put anything hot or warm in the fridge with a wrapper because it causes the steam to condensate and there's gonna be water clinging to the top of the wrapper and it will make ur food bad...

im not backed by rocket scientist or anything but thats the way my family does it...

hope i answered ur questons! =D

as long as its covered it does not matter you just cant unfreeze then freeze something again and if leftovers are not eating with in two days of being put in the fridge they need to be put in the trash and i have been cooking for years and have never made anyone sick

I guess the sooner you put it in, it's better for the food, but if you wait untill the food cools down, it's better for the refrigerator.

Sooner is better than later because then it will dry up the foods