Peter H.M. Brooks wrote:
> 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.
>

Your sister is a nut.

But... Why don't you take the curry over there cold? That will make
her happy, and it will be less work for you.

Best regards,
Bob