LogFAQs > #972322265

Dikitain posted...

People who obsess over food being out for too long are weird to me. Like, you aren't going to get violently sick and die because your food was sitting on the counter for 10 minutes. If you are that worried about it, just re-heat it. That will kill pretty much every piece of bacteria that can grow on your food in < 24 hours.

The concern isn't the bacteria so much as what they leave behind. Staph aureus, for example, is easily killed by reheating, but produces a toxin that can make you pretty violently ill, a toxin that isn't really possible to remove. That said, 10 minutes isn't going to do anything. The usual commercial food safety standard (at least in Canada) is no more than 4 hours between 4C and 60C, which is generally not hard to follow. There's some leeway on that as well, since commercial standards are always more stringent (because lawsuits), but I generally wouldn't recommend keeping anything with a significant protein content that's been out for more than 8 hours.

Now, saying that, it's just a risk. Nothing's guaranteed to cause harm, and if you're only doing it occasionally and never for really long periods, you probably won't ever encounter problems. It's still not a great idea, though, so maybe don't make a habit of it.