eli5: Why you can safely cook meat in a slow cooker (approx 8 hours on low), if after 2 hours on the counter it needs to be tossed?

Question

Surely it’s in the “danger zone” for a long time before being fully cooked, right? Could you leave out meat for 4 hours THEN toss it in a slow cooker?

In: 0

Answer 1

The key points are that even the coolest of cooking temperatures are high enough to kill microorganisms. So a slow cooked food still gets sanitized and is safe to eat.

The problem with “Danger Zone” foods is partially a living infection by microorganism but also the poisons and toxins they produce. So even if you cook a food that has sat out for a while and manage to kill off the colonizing organisms you are still left the toxins they produced while alive, those aren’t destroyed by cooking.

This is the reason why you need dispose of canned food you suspect was exposed to botulism. You can just cook the food and kill off the microbes but the toxin lingers and that’s actually the thing that can hurt you severely.