We believe that the refrigerator can handle everything, but reheating the same container several times is a feast for bacteria.
Something that can be common in many homes, especially when all its inhabitants work daily, is cooking on the weekend for the rest of your life. This practice today is called “batch cooking“and logically it involves a very common practice: take a large container out of the refrigerator, heat it a little, let the rest cool down and put it back in the refrigerator. Everything changes. Although food may look and taste the same to the naked eye, at a microscopic level, each cooling and reheating cycle turns the container into a real amusement park for bacteria. The danger. To understand the problem of reheating the container several times, you must first know a basic concept in food safety, which is ‘danger zone‘. This is nothing more than a temperature range that goes from 5 ºC to 60 ºC, where the bacteria present in food multiply at a high speed. Regarding this, there are different studies that indicate that every time we take the container out of the refrigerator, it heats up and cools down again to consume it later; the food slowly passes through that “danger zone.” If done several times a week, minutes are adding up and hours in which microorganisms have free rein to proliferate. There is more. Although when we get sick we can automatically blame bacteria, the truth is that sometimes the pathology can be generated by thermostable toxins generated by bacteria such as Bacillus cereuswhich produce a characteristic gastroenteritis that many of us have been through. This means that, even if we cook a food and kill the bacteria, its virulence product is still there and causes illness when consumed. Even if it boils. More than one reheated. Different scientific models have studied what happens when cooked foods suffer what is called “temperature abuse.” Here the science suggests that the fluctuations from going from the refrigerator to the counter, heating and cooling again, trigger the microbial load and sink the sensory quality of the dish. The case of rice It has undoubtedly been one of the most listened to, especially because of the danger it entails. Here science indicates that each reheating and cooling cycle exponentially increases the microbiological risk if adequate temperatures are not reached and maintained. One of the big problems of rice it’s in the bacteria Bacillus cereus, whose spores survive cooking and germinate if the rice is left at room temperature. The issue here is the toxins it generates, which end up with very serious gastrointestinal poisoning, which makes it dangerous to reheat rice from one day to the next when it has not been stored correctly after preparation. The chemical problem. Beyond the safety of the food, it is also important to focus on the container that contains it, since the constant cycles of intense cold and extreme heat in the microwave can degrade plastics. With this, it is achieved that the migration of chemical compounds towards food, especially fatty foods. That is why the jump to glass containers can be very interesting to improve food safety at home. How to do it right. To avoid these gastric scares, it is best to divide the food into different containers that correspond to an individual portion, even if it means washing many more pots on a daily basis. Also, when cooking, you should not leave the pot on the counter all afternoon, but rather it is better to cool it quickly and quickly place it in the refrigerator within a maximum of two hours. The temperature at which we reheat is also important, highlighting the need to reach 70ºC throughout the food for a minimum of 15 seconds in order to reduce the risk of contagion. Images | freepik In Xataka | Against tupperware: more and more voices think that storing food in plastic is not a good idea
