cheryl
Administrator
Staff member
Is reheated rice safe to eat? - The Guardian
So long as you store it properly, there’s no reason to be afraid of reheating cooked rice. It’s the building block for many a great dish
Can reheated cooked rice cause food poisoning? Yes, is the straight answer – though it’s not usually poor reheating skills that are to blame, but bad storage practices. As food scientist extraordinaire Harold McGee notes in his epic tome On Food & Cooking, “Raw rice almost always carries dormant spores of the bacterium Bacillus cereus, which produces powerful gastrointestinal toxins.” These, in turn, can cause unpleasantness, though thankfully only a relatively mild dose compared with other forms of food poisoning.
Those spores can even survive the cooking process, so the longer rice is kept at room temperature afterwards, the more likely bacteria are to thrive. Which is one reason, among many, to be thankful that those pea and sweetcorn-flecked rice salads so beloved of 20th-century buffets are rarely seen these days. To prevent bacterial growth, McGee advises chilling any cooked grains within four hours, though the NHS suggests even greater caution, saying to cool it down as fast as possible and get it in the fridge inside an hour; it also recommends binning cooked rice after 24 hours, never to reheat it more than once and to make sure it’s piping hot all the way through, which McGee, in typically thorough fashion, sets at 73C or above.
So long as you store it properly, there’s no reason to be afraid of reheating cooked rice. It’s the building block for many a great dish
Can reheated cooked rice cause food poisoning? Yes, is the straight answer – though it’s not usually poor reheating skills that are to blame, but bad storage practices. As food scientist extraordinaire Harold McGee notes in his epic tome On Food & Cooking, “Raw rice almost always carries dormant spores of the bacterium Bacillus cereus, which produces powerful gastrointestinal toxins.” These, in turn, can cause unpleasantness, though thankfully only a relatively mild dose compared with other forms of food poisoning.
Those spores can even survive the cooking process, so the longer rice is kept at room temperature afterwards, the more likely bacteria are to thrive. Which is one reason, among many, to be thankful that those pea and sweetcorn-flecked rice salads so beloved of 20th-century buffets are rarely seen these days. To prevent bacterial growth, McGee advises chilling any cooked grains within four hours, though the NHS suggests even greater caution, saying to cool it down as fast as possible and get it in the fridge inside an hour; it also recommends binning cooked rice after 24 hours, never to reheat it more than once and to make sure it’s piping hot all the way through, which McGee, in typically thorough fashion, sets at 73C or above.