If you’ve ever lost your patience waiting for your dinner to cooldown before you can put the leftovers in the fridge, you’re probably not alone. But you might want to rethink doing that again after finding out what a food policy specialist discovered after doing an experiment on warm leftovers in the fridge.
Food policy specialist Gavin Wren did a ‘scientific’ experiment to show why putting hot food in the fridge “really f***s with the temperature” and it might damage your appliance. To make his experiment as scientific as possible, Gavin took three temperature data loggers and put them in different parts of the fridge – one in the salad drawer, one at the back of the middle shelf, and the last one at the front of the top shelf.
“These three areas of the fridge will respond very differently to things like, the door being left open, putting hot food in, or adding new shopping into the fridge,” Gavin explained. He then created an interactive graph to showed how the temperatures changed when he put hot leftovers in the fridge.
For example, at 7am Gavin forgot to close the fridge door, which meant the top shelf area spiked up to nearly 9 degrees, the middle shelf to 7 degrees, but the salad drawer stayed the same.
To test his theory further, Gavin put a saucepan of lukewarm rice on the bottom shelf of the fridge, which actually had a “minor impact on the salad drawer too”.
At 7pm Gavin cooked some food with ingredients from his fridge, portioned them up and put them onto the top shelf of the fridge. “The top shelf went up to a massive 18 degrees and it took four hours to come back down to a normal temperature,” Gavin explained.
While this could be detrimental to your fridge, it can also cause the other food in your fridge to go off quicker. Gavin explained the grim consequences: “This would make something like milk go off 10 times faster than normal. And that’s precisely why you’re supposed to let food cool before you put them in the fridge.”
Regarding putting leftovers in the fridge, the UK Food Standards Agency says: “Don’t place hot or warm food in your fridge. Instead, cool cooked food at room temperature and place in the fridge within one to two hours. To cool food quickly, divide food into smaller portions in containers or freezer bags before putting in the fridge or freezer.”
It’s important to remember that leaving them outside the fridge for too long is also bad, as the fridge slows down bacterial growth. Bacteria grows fastest at temperatures between 4 and 60 degrees, also known as the “danger zone.”
If food is left at this temperature for several hours it can cause bacteria to grow. That’s why it’s important to get the food to room temperature as quickly as possible before puttin the fridge, for example by dividing food into smaller batches, leaving it under the kitchen extractor fan, or if your food is in an air tight container, you can give it a ‘cold water bath’