Time and Temperature Abuse
Published By
Mike Sorrentino
Published On
October 2023
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The CDC defines time-temperature abuse as when food is left in the temperature danger zone of 41°F–135°F for more than two hours. Foods that have been time-temperature abused by keeping them in the temperature danger zone for too long cause bacteria to begin to grow and multiply rapidly. Serving this food can then make your customers seriously sick, especially those who are highly susceptible to foodborne illnesses.
The best place to start is before there is even food in your building. Do you have the correct ordering pars? If you have too much food on hand you will have trouble storing it appropriately. If you have too little food you will be scrambling to get it or force thawing it. Then you want to make sure your storage area has proper temperatures and is organized smartly. Next you will want to have a progressive freeze pull system that allows you to thaw food under refrigeration. This way you can skip the other risky ways to thaw food. The next step is receiving the food. It is important to inspect deliveries. Having a manager or trusted team member to do the inspection is best. In my experience when deliveries don`t get checked you end up with the poorest quality of product. A keen eye can spot signs of thaw and refreezing, or dented and damaged boxes. Having a good thermometer is great for spot checking some temps.
Now that you have the receiving and storing squared away, let's move on to prepping. One common mistake I see a lot is a cook will take out all the ingredients of a few dishes they will be prepping in the next couple of hours. Sure it makes sense and speeds up the process, and who is not concerned with productivity? But when it comes time to prep that last dish, how long have those ingredients been left out? The best practice is to take out only the ingredients for one dish at a time. Also another common scenario is a cook in the middle of prepping something but then the line gets busy and they are pulled in to help. The problem is if the interruption is a long one then those ingredients will be out for longer than expected. In this case it would be prudent to move the prep back into the walk-in until there is time to continue. Also if you have a very time consuming prep task you can mitigate the risk by keeping the ingredients packed in ice to control the temperature.
Next if you have prepared something by cooking it and it will not be served right away it needs to be cooled. The Food and Drug Administration Food Code recommended procedure for cooling food in restaurants and foodservice establishments is the two-stage cooling method. In the two-stage cooling method, food must be cooled from 140 °F to 70 °F within two hours and to 41 °F or lower within four hours. The key is to hit those 2 benchmarks of 70 °F in the first two hours and then to below 41 °F in the next four hours for a total of six hours. Traditional thinking would be just stick it in the walkin, but there are considerations. First the size and power of your walk-in. Every hot thing put into a walk-in can raise the temperature of the whole walkin then putting all of the contents at risk. If it's a big and powerful walkin and the size of what you are cooling is not large then no worries. One best practice is to remove from the oven and store at room temp for 1st two hours or until 70 °F then transfer to walkin at that point to get to below 41 °F.
Finally now that you have spent time and money to ensure food was delivered correctly, stored appropriately, prepped safely and then cooled correctly it would be a shame to abuse time and temperature at this point. The tried and true way to insure safe food handling practices is with a quality line check. As tedious as most people think they are; they are VITAL to serving safe food! Recording conditions and temperature of food a few times a day will put you in a potion to discard bad quality and ensure hot food hot (above 140 ° F ) and cold food cold (below 41 ° F ).