Question:
Dear Advice Guy,
We keep nachos with cheese sauce in a warmer but never toss them. They are both sealed but they get heated and left there until they get bought. How long should they really be kept in the heater before we toss them?
– David, Boston
Answer:
When thinking about hot holding, there are two main considerations: food safety and food quality. Both are important.
The FDA Food Code specifies hot holding at 135 degrees Fahrenheit or higher. Some municipalities use a higher number, like 140 degrees. Be sure to check with your local health department to be sure you are compliant. As long as the food is held above the minimum required temperature, you are in compliance from a food safety perspective. There is no maximum amount of time the hot food can be held, which is where the quality comes in.
While food hot held for hours may be perfectly safe to eat, it may not hold well from a quality perspective. A product like nachos could begin to lose crispness or the cheese sauce could change in texture or color.
My advice is that even if your nacho holding is compliant from a food safety perspective, you should do some testing to establish the standard operating procedures for how long you should reasonably hold your product. You can follow these steps for nearly any individually packaged item:
- Load hot holding cabinet with packaged product all from the same case/production date.
- At regular increments totaling about twice your desired holding time, take a product out. For example, if your ideal holding time would be four hours, and you can fit 16 packages of nachos in the cabinet, take one out every 30 minutes for up to eight hours.
- Evaluate the appearance, aroma, texture and taste of the nachos at each 30-minute interval, looking for anything you would find unacceptable from a quality perspective. Common things to look for might be off or rancid aromas, darkening or clumping of the cheese sauce or soggy texture of the chips.
- Based on when you see the changes (if ever), put a conservative guideline in place with your maximum hold time so that all product held during that window will be safe and high quality.
In general, it is a good practice to reduce food waste and maintain quality by heating and holding only what you think you will sell, adding more product in smaller intervals rather than over-prepping.
More on hot holding here.
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