You’re not supposed to defrost meats in warm water due to harmful bacteria growth, you’re not supposed to leave food at room temperature for long without being refrigerated because of harmful growth but, when you go to a buffet, food can sit out for hours under heat lamps and be fine?
In: Biology
A huge amount of this is people not properly understanding what food safety guidelines mean and are for, by the way. Food safety guidelines were not written for your house, they were written for restaurants. A restaurant kitchen is chaos and it’s filled with both people and food and all sorts of other stuff. They serve tons of people. You serve yourself and your family and maybe friends.
a restaurant sized cut of frozen meat is often 10+ pounds. You almost never have that much meat to thaw.
So if you take out a steak (even a big one) and put in on a safe place on your counter, it will mostly me fine to thaw there. It won’t take that long and anything that might grow on it will be killed by the fact that you’re cooking it (as things will only really grow on the outside). A restaurant can’t make those assumptions (for starters because they often have whole cuts of meat that might take many hours or even days to thaw even at room temperature. Think of how long it takes to really thaw a turkey).
in reality, bacterial growth on food is MORE dangerous after you’ve cooked it for most things. Because then you just eat it. Think of the heat maps at the buffet as the equivalent of keeping things warm in the oven at home. Also bear in mind that at a buffet (in theory, but not always in practice) the foot gets cycled out. Bad stuff like bacteria, fungus, etc takes a while to take root in meat. At home you rarely ever run into this (unless you’re in college and leave pizza out on the counter for days) but in a buffet tons of people are eating that food. If you watch you’ll likely see new food coming out regularly. Sometimes the old stuff just goes in back and gets repurposed (which SHOULD include making it safe by way of more cooking) or get tossed when it’s old, but in theory the food on a buffet should always be relatively fresh and safe because of the time as much as anything else.
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