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I bought my husband a huge bistecca steak for Fathers Day (think giant t-bone) so it was sitting on the bottom rack of the fridge. Tonight for dinner we ate a chicken stew that was still very hot when i put it in a left-over container so I left the lid askew and left it to cool slightly before putting it in the fridge. I forgot about it for about 30 minutes but then called out to my daughter to put it in the fridge…here is my question…my daughter placed the Tupperware on top of the giant steak and there it sat for about an hour and a half until I noticed it. The steak definitely didn’t feel cold to the touch (it is vacuumed sealed) but it wasn’t warm. Would it be dangerous to eat?

Worried steak
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  • Hi, your question is quite basic when it comes to food safety. I am afraid we have taken to closing these basic questions as a duplicate, since everybody can answer them by the application of a few simple rules, and they were crowding out other content on the site. For people like you, we created a bit of a primer on how food safety works: https://cooking.stackexchange.com/tags/food-safety/info. Hope all goes well with your dinner, steak or not! – rumtscho Aug 31 '22 at 17:50

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Most likely it will not be dangerous. Even if the steak was in the bacterial danger zone between 8 °C and 60° C (40 to 140 Fahrenheit), it would only have been there for max 1.5 hours before you removed the stew (which would have had 30 min to cool before). The maximum recommended time to leave food in the danger is two hours. But: your steak was a) also vacuum sealed and b) if it is a bistecca steak, it will have a large thermal mass, slowing down the heating process. Also c) you will most likely sear the outside hard. If you eat the steak soon I see no problem, and it would be a real shame to throw away a nice steak for this reason.

John Doe
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  • Thank you for your answer. Will it make it much worse that we aren’t planning to eat the steak until Sunday? And even though the leftovers had 30 minute to cool they were very very hot and in a full container before they were put in the fridge so I can only imagine the bottom of the plastic container would have been quite warm if not still hot when it was placed on the steak. – Clooney Aug 31 '22 at 13:02
  • You should be able to keep raw meat that has been vacuum sealed for up to 10 days in the fridge. But an inspection of the meat before cooking it will be a much better indicator - does it smell bad or funny, etc. Maybe you can open the vacuum sealed bag on Friday or Saturday so even if the steak has gone bad you still have time to buy a new one. – John Doe Aug 31 '22 at 14:40