Cool Down Hot Food Before It Goes In The Fridge

Have you ever been told to cool down hot food before it goes in the fridge? For anyone working in gastronomy, this is common knowledge and common practice. Every mom who cooks regularly for her kid(s) knows this. Yet, for most other human beings, this is not-so-common knowledge.

It wasn’t knowledge to me until I stumbled upon the question. It made me think. I realized that I didn’t know why. That’s when I decided to dig for answers to quench my curiosity. If you are curious about the answers as well, read along!

When You Cool Down Hot Food, You Are Efficient with Energy

To explain this point, let’s look at the counter-example. Assume that you don’t cool down freshly made hot food, and just place it in the fridge. Hot food usually releases moisture in the form of steam, and this steam condenses. This steam condensate ends up in the exposed metal tubes of your refrigerator. The metal tubes then get covered with ice and snow.

The newly formed ice and snow restrict the metal tubes from removing heat efficiently from the refrigerator as they used to. This causes the refrigerator to consume more energy to sustain the same temperature as before, ultimately leading to thermal inefficiency. This might build up to the point where you might need to shut down or defrost the fridge before it starts working properly again. All of this would be because of uncooled hot food.

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Condensation Changes How Your Food Tastes

Let’s say you don’t want to ruin your fridge, and refrigerate hot food in a closed container. Now it is true that the fridge has an easier life when you do this. But on the other hand, your hot food still releases steam, which condenses. This time, the condensation happens on the inside of the lid of the container, which ultimately drips back into the food. This could significantly change how the food tastes as compared to how it is supposed to. In worst cases, it could completely ruin the food such as with crispy food items like fries or baked items like a cake.

Restaurants Bear Extra Responsibility to Cool Down Hot Food

Restaurants and other entities operating in the gastronomy industry have it extra hard because they cook in large volumes. As a consequence, their refrigeration requirements are also in large volumes. Whenever they need to cool down hot food, they make sure that the food is cooled down using shallow containers before the food is transferred to tall containers and refrigerated. This is because of health concerns.

When it comes to food, it is generally fine when the food is downright hot (freshly cooked) or downright cold (after refrigeration). However, lukewarm food poses a risk in terms of contamination. If the restaurants transfer large volumes of hot food into tall containers directly and refrigerate them, the rate of cooling would turn out to be very slow, which may lead to lukewarm food overnight. And lukewarm food is often what causes sickness in people due to contamination.

Why Should You Cool Down Hot Food First?

It all boils down to two things:

1. By doing so, you are saving your refrigerator from being affected by condensing steam and thereby losing efficiency.
2. By letting food sit at lukewarm temperatures for a prolonged duration of time (let’s say 6 hours or longer) in the fridge you increase contamination risk. Although this is more of a problem for restaurants (because of their food production volumes), it could also be useful knowledge for the average person. This is because everyone cooks a lot now and then, and it would certainly help to be aware of contamination risks.

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Further reading that might interest you: 5 Underrated Immunity Boosters and Is It Okay to Kill Animals For Food?