I'm making a curry for my father's 85th birthday party tomorrow. Not
that that's particularly relevant to the post, but still...

My sister works for a food retailer and is consequently paranoid about
various matters related to food - as, of course, any good food retailer
must be. I'm not sure that quite the same level of paranoia is required
at home though.

My sister is of the opinion that it would be dangerous to re-heat the
curry tomorrow morning, then travel over to her house (a twenty minute
drive) and then heat it again for serving. She's afraid that everybody
will be poisoned if this happens. According to her re-heating the food
twice will be much more dangerous than re-heating it twice.

She might be right, but I'm interested to know exactly what the
mechanism is. If I heat food to boiling point then only bacteria that
survive at higher temparatures will survive, during the cooling period
it may indeed be re-colonised, by bacteria from the air but again this
would be killed by re-heating to boiling (and keeping it there for a few
minutes, of course).

I can see that it is wise usually to keep food refridgerated and only
heat that which is required shortly before the meal, and I'm not
advocating re-heating the same curry many times over several days.
However, I am interested to know just how big the danger of food
poisoning would be from two re-headings tomorrow relative to only one.
Would it truly create a danger of poisoning or is it paranoid to worry
about it?

If there's an URL describing bacterial growth and re-heating food
showing research results I'd be delighted to read that.

--
"You will not ask me what is the point of envy.--You are determined, I
see, to have no curiosity.--You are wise--but _I_ cannot be wise. Emma,
I must tell you what you will not ask, though I may wish it unsaid the
next moment." -- Emma, Jane Austen
* TagZilla 0.057 * http://tagzilla.mozdev.org