Expert: Carol Schlitt - 11/14/2006

Question
We cooked a pot roast and left it on stove top to cool.  At 10pm it was still too hot to put in fridge.  Forgot about it, went to bed.  If it was put in the fridge at 6am, is there a high probability of food poisoning?

Answer
Hi Greg,

Anything is possible with potentially hazardous foods (meat, eggs, dairy products, fish, etc) left at temperatures that encourage the growth of bacteria. Some bacteria produce a toxin that is not deactivated by reheating the product.

Since we don't have a way at home to determine if a food is 100% safe, we have to use other means to determine if a food is safe.  Those means are -- was the food allowed to be in the danger zone (40 to 140 degrees)for more than 6 hours. Restaurants have 6 hours to cool food down from 140 to 40 within 6 hours to ensure safety. Since your food was in the danger zone for 8 hours, I can not recommend consuming the food.

Sorry....

Carol