So many of us these days are food prepping either for ourselves or for someone we love. New mothers always appreciate sheet pans full of enchiladas, lasagna, or a casserole. Sick relatives can always use help feeding themselves. And, it has long been a tradition to bring food to people in times of grieving.
Plus, now with the hustle and bustle of life, many people have found it easier to meal prep at the beginning of the week rather than rush around trying to figure out what to eat during the busy work or school day. With that in mind, it helps to understand how to cook, cool, and reheat food properly to avoid any potential food safety issues.
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Cooking Food
When cooking food, the biggest concerns typically arise around meat and fish. Here are a few tips to remember in general:
Chicken and turkey should be cooked so they show no signs of pink on the inside. You want well-done poultry every time.
With pork, you want to cook it just to fully cooked, unless you’re braising or roasting it. Any pork cooked on the stovetop or in the oven, like pork chops or other steak-like cuts, can breed toxins when undercooked and can be really tough and chewy when overcooked.
Beef is the safest of all meats in terms of cooking. In most cases, you can cook it medium rare and get great results. Just be cautious when it comes to where you get your meat from. Any contamination will typically come from the factory.
Fish should also be fully cooked unless you have special sushi-grade fish that you plan to prepare accordingly. Otherwise, you’ll want your fish just on the other side of fully cooked. Fish will start to lose flavor and get tough if you cook it beyond that.
Allow Your Food to Cool
One thing many people don’t realize when meal prepping is that you don’t want to put your food straight into the refrigerator or freezer once it’s cooked.
Why?
Well, it might be fine for the food you just cooked, but it can create real problems for the food already in your refrigerator and especially in your freezer.
Placing piping hot food in a container into the freezer will temporarily raise the temperature of the food already in the freezer. Doing this repeatedly can allow space for bacteria to breed in partially thawed food and lead to food poisoning.
To be safe, once you’ve fully prepared your dish and have it in its storage container, make sure you allow it to cool fully to the touch before placing it in the fridge or freezer.
Storing Your Food
About those storage containers. Remember to keep all your food in airtight containers. The refrigerator is a happy breeding ground for bacteria, so any chance it gets to squeeze its way into your food, it will.
The last thing you want is to pull out your leftovers (cold roast beef sandwiches, anyone?) only to get sick a few hours later.
Invest in solid metal or glass containers with airtight lids. Plastic can be dangerous because it tends to get scratches, and those tiny cracks and crevices are fun places for bacteria to hide. If you do use plastic, make sure it’s hard plastic and that it is scratch free before you store anything inside.
Reheating Your Food
Finally, you’re ready to reheat your food!
The USDA guidelines say you should always reheat your leftovers to an internal temperature of 165 degrees Fahrenheit. They call this “outside of the danger zone.” Below that temperature, you still run the risk of having bacteria hiding inside your food, just waiting to get you sick.
Now, you may have heard that you should not heat, cool, and reheat food multiple times. This is mostly an old wives’ tale.
In general, if your food has been properly prepared, cooled, and stored, you can reheat it and cool it as many times as you like without any risk of illness.
However, it is always a good idea to only reheat the portion of stored leftovers that you actually plan to eat purely because the quality will be affected otherwise.
Every time you cool and reheat food, you are heating out nutrients and flavor. Plus, the longer you store food, the more flavor it loses.
Mimic the Original
Another helpful tip about reheating food is to remember to try to mimic the original form of cooking. If the food was prepared in the oven, it is likely best reheated back in the oven, if it was fried, it’s likely going to be best reheated on the stovetop or in an air fryer, and so on.
Understand Appliances
Also remember that the oven cooks low and slow from the inside out while the stovetop and the air fryer will cook from the outside in. Understanding your food and your appliances is key to getting quality results when cooking, cooling, and reheating food.
Be Patient
In the end, when it comes to food preparation, everything is a matter of trial and error. You may read these instructions and find they don’t work for your oven, your food, or your time. That’s the joy of cooking — watching what others do then making that work for yourself.
Be patient, be willing to make mistakes, and be willing to keep being brave.
You’ll end up with amazing food and perhaps even better leftovers.
What do you think? Do you have specific instructions or tips for cooking, cooling, and reheating food? Let me know in the comments. I love to hear from my readers.
