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I would never dream to serve a paying customer sausages from a gas station that have been there for who knows how long, but I 100% would devour 2-3 of those at 11 after work!
My family does this and my last girlfriend nearly killed me after I left a pizza box with a few slices in it in the oven and she preheated it without knowing it was in there she called me at work freaking out, I just asked her if my slices survived… bit charred but still edible
That's that corrugated cardboardclassic brick oven char.
To this day I crack the oven & peek in before touching any dials because I did that myself once. My first weekend left unsupervised as a younger teen and I almost started a fire in my childhood home. A one-and-done teachable moment.
My ex is PR and leaves pans of cooking oil in the oven. I was also a big fan of preheating the oven without checking the contents first. Wildly dangerous.
i gained this habit in a much easier way. too many times have i preheated the oven, 15 mins later when i have a big casserole dish in my hands i open the oven to multiple hot cast irons. So fortunately the inconvenience alone helped me learn to check
There was a MASSIVE reddit thread about this. I'm on your team. The oven is perfectly cromulent place to store the pizza DAY OF until you've sawed off enough to shove the rest in the fridge.
People who preheat ovens without looking are some gosh dang morons.
I was raised by a germaphope and when I was like 17 I went to a buddy's house and he gave me a cold slice of pizza from the oven.
I just assumed it had been put there earlier in the afternoon, only later that evening did I find out it had been in there for 2 days
It had never occurred to me that somebody would commit such an atrocity like this with food. But here I am surviving the ordeal! My mother lost her shit when I told her.
I fucking love 8+ hour old hot dogs that have been spinning and heating all day. My wife and son both are like wtf when I randomly come outta the gas station with hot dogs like “they had some!” And I only get the older ones, fuck those fresh in the front ones. Gimme that shit that’s in the back bro, that one you was about to throw away lol
I’m right there with you. I’ll take all the 8 hour cooked hot dogs. Sidebar, if you make your hot dogs in an air fryer at low temp, you get roller hot dog vibes.
Oh man the glorious meals we've all had that have been in room temp for over 2 hours, enjoyed while sitting on a bucket surrounded by dirty dishes and towels
My grandparents would just cover leftover lunch with a bigger bowl, leave it in aa cupboard, and reheat it in the wok for dinner. Never had a single case of food poisoning over all my visits to them spanning 30+ years
All the posh FOH executives at a stupid billionaire's vanity project I was briefly involved with made horrible faces when I said that some of the greatest bites of my life were eaten over a trash can. But it's 100% true. So ?
Ate an arepa filled with trimmings from some excellent ribeye last night while hunched over a garbage can ten hours in to a fourteen hour shift. Probably the best shit I’ve eaten in weeks. Life be different in the back.
He ain't wrong. I've eaten plenty of questionable food that would get me fired and or locked up for serving to a customer. I think it's helped strengthen my immune system beyond the tolerances of the average restaurant patron.
Sure I may poop more than is acceptable and I sometimes find it hard breath, but I truly feel like a giant amongst men.
A lot of those safety standards exist because of scale. Most of the time you'll be fine, but there's a lot more possibility for something bad to happen when you're serving hundreds of people a day, and if someone gets sick then there's probably going to be multiple people getting sick. At an individual level, we're pretty good at telling when food has gone off.
Given the ServSafe training, temp logs/ times and temp sheets i always gotta do, one day I was reheating some food for dinner and was curious so I decided to temp it... 112 degrees and it was perfect lol.
I love the irony of not putting in the fridge while still warm for food safety purposes, and then throwing food safety guidelines out of the window completely when you realize you forgot to put it in the fridge.
The issue is with COVERING hot leftovers. When you cover it, you slow down its cooling rate. This means it stays in the danger zone, the temp at which bacteria multiply exponentially.
With food, you either keep it hot, or you make sure it cools quickly.
So, yes, put your food in the fridge, even if it’s hot, but leave it uncovered in there until it’s cooled.
In addition to what the other guy said (evap/condensation provides a growth medium for pathogens), warm stuff makes the stuff around it warmer as it cools. So that hot-ass ziti you just stuck on the shelf next to the chicken for tomorrow's dinner put the chicken above safe temp for multiple hours.
This is actually a pervasive myth, it was even debunked 50 years ago and has continued to be debunked but still persists for some reason. The only harm in storing hot food is straining your fridge if you’re doing a lot at a time, or if you’re storing really large quantities of something like stock you should either divide the batch into smaller containers or use ice baths/ice wands. A batch of ziti? Can go in hot and is recommended by the FDA to do so, and you can store it uncovered to keep the condensation from ruining any crust as long as there’s no overhead contamination risk, and then wrap or cover it once it’s cooled.
It’s over blown, as a general rule the faster you can cool something the safer it is. Ya you can find little issues like it warms up stuff around it in the fridge. Well, move those things! just like you’d move raw meat around other, not-to-be-cooked items.
While you can be assured that while the food that is cooling is above the danger zone temps, it doesn’t need to be in the fridge, there’s no arguing that putting it in the fridge will cool it the fastest.
My buddy left one of those frozen prepackaged chicken parm meals in his freezer in our apartment in college over winter break, and he unplugged his fridge when he left for the month. He came back and plugged everything back in, not realizing what he had done. A few weeks later, he got hungry and checked his fridge and saw that (re-re-re)frozen meal. Popped that bad boy in the microwave and got about two bites through it before asking me if I thought it smelled funny. That shit was RANCID. I’ve never seen so many substances that should be thick, be thin, and substances that should be never be gelatinous. I thought he might actually die, but he threw up immediately and was all good.
In my case, it's combined with a weird metallic taste that I only get a couple of seconds before I vomit. As soon as I taste that taste, I know I'd better book it to a toilet or trash can or something.
Yeah but shrimp is the absolute worst thing for harboring bacteria. If you were deliberately trying to food poison somebody you'd make a shrimp dish; probably a ceviche.
Hey Sharon, i hope you enjoyed that yogurt that was labeled for me in the staff break room because it was in the trunk of my car for a week before I put it there. I knew you were stealing it you bitch...
If someone is stealing food from the staff room, you should definitely do something like this. It can't be proven that you weren't going to eat it in that state (the thing that gets you in trouble when you sabotage food)
Sharon can spend a week not knowing which end to point at the toilet bowl, she had it coming.
Incredibly, unreasonably spicy is the way to go. Preferably with something that has a real slow burn so they get a few bites in before they realize what they’ve done. Plus, it’s just food. No sabotaging involved.
This ziti, especially in tin foil, so long as I knew the house it was in didn't have any pest issues, would 100% eat it after it was left out. And agreed, I'd never serve it to anyone else, especially not someone pregnant.
Last night, we ate crock pot beef stew that I made with all the veg I had, a lot of beans and lentils, tomato based sauce with some cream added... We left it out, lol. No lid, just YOLO on the counter all night, and I contemplated saving it for like thirty seconds, but the filmy crust that developed on top had me nope the fuck out and then I remembered there's technically dairy involved (and not cheese) and it's just a nope.
Very annoyed with myself, but at least it was made with the literal cheapest round steaks I found.
Would absolutely feed it to myself, would never feed it to another person. I especially wouldn't want a pregnant person to eat it. I have the least regard for my own well being though so Im heating it up and crushing it
Id make a fresh batch for my partner. I have these little single serve Corningware casserole dishes that are perfect for things like this. Id make her her own little pasta dish and save the funky stuff for myself
i think a lot of people in this thread are missing the point. Yes, the ziti is probably fine to eat and we’d all house it happily, but OOP is 1) pregnant, so being extra cautious with food safety, 2) MADE THE ZITI HERSELF and was looking forward to enjoying it, probably with the extra intensity people look forward to their favorite foods with while pregnant, 3) TRUSTED her husband to take care of just the very last and easiest step of this large and time-consuming project: putting a casserole dish in the fridge.
The right thing for him to do now, imo, regardless of whether he’s still going to eat the old one, is to make a new one of these casseroles from scratch for her, or go get the ingredients for a new one and offer to be her sous in the kitchen, if she is the better cook and wants to remake it herself. If I accidentally forgot to put away a big delicious casserole my pregnant spouse (or anyone, spouse or not, pregnant or not) had made, so that she then felt unsafe eating any of it, I would be mortified. I’d want to make it up to them. The phrasing of OOP makes it sound like the husband was just, “oops! Shrug emoji! Haha well I’LL still eat it!” and if that was his attitude, that’s infuriating, and i’m not even the pregnant spouse. Honestly, for all the stereotypes about pregnancy hormones making you emotionally unstable, this woman sounds way more calm than i would have been if i were her.
Pizza cools to faster due to larger surface area and though it doesn't drop the below the danger zone (9-63°c) it will be lower than a nice deep ziti holding heat in the middle longer at higher, bacteria loving near-body temp.
Botulism (Clostridium botulinium) spores grow and make toxins under specific conditions:
low or no oxygen (anaerobic) environments, low acid, low salt, low sugar, certain temperature ranges and certain water levels.
C. botulinium only grows under anaerobic conditions. You're more likely to find botulism in your jar of honey than in left-out-overnight cooked pasta
B. Cereus would be the more likely issue with this particular dish.
It could be fine, it could make you shit your guts out for a couple days, or could make you vomit for a couple days, or if you are really really unlucky, it could kill you.
Totally, OOP is fine to do whatever they'd like, but this poster has no reason to be shocked OOP's husband is eating some improperly stored pasta. Also, he probably felt bad for his mistake, and won't let his wife's work go to waste because of a few million/billion bacteria joining the party.
I mean, raise your hand if you've inhaled the two slices of sausage, pepperoni, and olive pizza in a savage attempt at distracting yourself from the nightmare hangover of 10 shots of Jager and Goldschlager backed with kamakazis and two packs of smokes?
A ziti left out over night does not even rank.
It'd be fine for most people, but I don't blame the OP for not eating it while pregnant. If you're not even supposed to eat medium steaks or seafood while pregnant, overnight ziti is probably out too right?
Does he not understand that things cool faster in the fridge? And the whole idea of Covering it before it's cold is the WRONG ORDER of operations for cooling and storing. You want the food cold before it's covered. Your husband sounds like he has NO IDEA what he's doing with food.
Bro this is a professional cooking sub and some of these people don’t understand it cools faster in the fridge lol they probably think cold water boils faster too.
I'm surprised by all of the comments saying they'd still eat it. Would gross me out too much to even want to take the chance. But also referring to the original post, you don't need to cool it down to put it in the fridge.
Damn, y’all are wild. I’ve absolutely eaten some sketchy unrefrigerated food, but never “left in my car for four days during summer” levels of sketchy like some of you fuckers.
I got really banged up one night when it was "my Friday." I woke up the next morning with an awful hangover. I looked in the fridge for my leftover pizza, but it wasn't there. Two days later, I discovered the entire pizza in my car. No wonder I had a hangover! Well, I looked long and hard at that pizza. It still looked perfect. The cheese still looked freshly melted and everything. I really, really wanted to try it, and since I live in Las Vegas, I figured that the poor pizza probably hadn't gotten under 125° in those two days.
But I threw it in the dumpster, because I might be stupid, but I'm not THAT stupid.
Yeah I can assure you, the people who are saying "Hell yeah I'd eat that!" have likely never had an extreme case of food poisoning. I wound up not going to the ER, but I was borderline for a few hours. I slept in the bathroom overnight and most of the next day because...reasons. Lol. And that shit wiped me out for the better part of a week. The most lethargic, run down feeling I've ever had. Hard pass indeed.
Just for the record, starchy foods are high risk for bacteria growth. I've had "fried rice poisonig" and it is rough. Pasta and potatoes are so innocent looking but yikes!
Haha. Oh man. This does fit my wife's idea of counter food. Basically, it's baked so she thinks it's fine to sit out. One day I will take the time to send a sample to the lab to be tested. Do I think it will change anything? Absolutely not. Are there still grapes making their own wine on the counter right now? Yes.
Growing up my family always left food out overnight because it was easier (I think) for my dad to take his meals not cold in the morning. Only recently did I learn that’s not ok when my gf freaked out because I was eating left out chicken
That she made it but can’t eat it because he left out and she is pregnant? It would suck to make so much work and someone leave it out so you can’t have any
I’ve eaten far worse for sure. Like many comments have said, I wouldn’t ever serve that. Probably not even to my wife. But if I give myself the shits, who cares 🤷♂️
I'd eat it. What bothers me is when the stupid timer on my crockpot ends and it shuts off while I'm sleeping or not noticing, and then I have no idea how long my food has been sitting there in a closed, off crockpot cooling down with the lid on.
I grew up around Mexican families, and a pot of rice on the stove top was always there, and everyone dipped into it through the days, mind you, the rice was .often used in a day or two and remade anew throughout the week.
My wife's family is Hispanic and Filipino so she was raised the same.
Now i am a chef , all the rules and science serve safe education aside,- I'll still eat overnight rice and many times a left out covered meal, especially in cooler months.. but a chubbyemu video about "fried rice syndrome" and the college kid eating reheated few day old room-temperature rice and dying has kind of made me adjust my grace with countertop food for myself
I am this post. My wife is this wife. Constant fight. She is improving my health and I'm not leaving cold pizza on the counter to eat over the next week even though god intended it to be eaten that way. Listen to your better halves.
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u/flairassistant 7d ago
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