Refrigerating Leftovers
A common question people ask is how long can leftovers be kept for. Well, as I go along I’ll pass on my personal experience on this, with a couple of caveats.
Recent dishes I have refrigerated and eaten are;
Frozen
Pork Vindaloo (from 2 weeks ago, still have 2 portions frozen)
Malaysian Beef Curry (from 4 weeks ago)
Braised Pork Shoulder (last week)
Refrigerated
Spare Ribs and Watercress Soup (eaten on the third day)
I re-heated all by microwaving.
In all cases, keeping quality was fine. I did very slightly overdo the microwaving for the pork vindaloo, so there were some dry spots on the meat.
For the soup, the flavours matured somewhat, which was very nice. But with mature flavours, saltiness does become more apparent, so if you will refrigerate anything, go easy on the salt. That said, we do use very little salt at home and we are thus pretty sensitive to salty tastes.
Now the food safety part.
Caveats
1) I observe strict hygiene, so I wash my hands very often during food prep and cooking, and take care to avoid cross-contamination, ie knives, boards, plates etc used for raw foods do not come in contact with cooked food. Contaminated food is unsafe to keep.
2) Leftovers are promptly put into clean covered containers and as soon as cool enough, usually in 1 - 2 hours max, are put in the fridge or freezer as appropriate. They never ever sit out for longer than 4 hours (this is a very common limit on exposure at room temperature, unless you are an Eskimo at the North Pole), and if I forget to refrigerate and find them out the next morning, I discard without even sniffing the food.
All dishes mentioned are on my website - just go into the recipe page, enter the recipe name in the Search Box on the upper right corner and hit enter or click search. Easy as that.
Be economical, and be safe!
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