So, I just made some fudge from a recipe that says to chill it once poured into a greased pan.
Given feedback on the fridge video... do y'all just never ever do that in Europe? Because, yeah, the little red fridge would not handle that well at all but I got a lot of folks being like "well, duh, you just don't put warm things in the fridge, everybody knows that" in the comments.
We don't know that because - get this - our fridges can usually just handle it!
Like, yeah, you can go too far. Put a huge hot dish in there and it'll be overwhelmed.
But... putting warm things in the fridge to chill is a thing I imagine nearly everyone does from time to time here, and recipes assume your fridge is up to it. Hell, even just, like, Jell-O assumes that's gonna be A-OK.
It's been humorous discovering this apparent continental fridge difference! We like our fridges cold, fast, and uniform.
@TechConnectify I was always, always told 'never put warm things in the fridge!' Just never been a thing. Rice for example, 'would make you have food poison and you don't want that, do you?' Honestly I never researched if that was true or not, I just... Never did it. Was scared into not doing so.
@FreakyFwoof food safety course hat going on! Rice is genuinely tricky because it's got a ton of thermal mass and b. cereus is a nasty bug.
If you put a big quantity of cooked rice in a fridge, the core of it will probably stay in the danger zone for several hours even if the fridge has no trouble keeping the air temp around it stable. To be safe, it should be broken into smaller quantities before being chilled
@jscholes@FreakyFwoof like, I probably wouldn't put more than a quart- (liter-ish) sized container in at once.
My folks make homemade dog food using a big ol' rice cooker, and I wouldn't put that pot straight into the fridge if I wanted to cool down rice for myself. They often do since it's for their dogs, and so far there haven't been problems, but it's not a risk I'd take for human food
@TechConnectify exactly right. Spreading the rice out on a baking tray is the best approach, especially if you can be bothered to pre-chill the tray, and the result is perfect leftover rice for making fried rice. =)
@TechConnectify not really, like when we are supposed to chill pudding after making it we usually let it cool (outside) until it's only slightly warm, and then put it in the fridge. In general I avoid putting anything that is over room temp in the fridge right away, to safe electricity cost
@TechConnectify in a previous life of foodservice, we'd typically cook a large, wide pan of food, and put it at the top of the walk-in refrigerator to cool it quickly and prevent the introduction of bacteria
I just thought that was universally standard practice? 🤷
@mykie judging by the (apparently) normal fridge temps maintained in Europe, I'm starting to realize we have much higher food-safety standards this side of the Atlantic (which is, frankly, surprising!).
The number of folks like "well yeah, fridges are colder in different parts, so they're labeled with what should go where - and 8°C is totally fine" was wild to me.
@waffle_iron@TechConnectify i suspect a lot of this is due to wildly different supply chain designs between the two continents. i remember digging into the whole "eggs at room temperature" thing one time, and it seemed largely due to how long the supply chain was in the us versus much of europe and what that implies.
@petrillic@waffle_iron from my understanding, the egg difference is that we wash our eggs before sale which removes their protective membrane and makes them more susceptible to rotting or becoming unsafe.
@platypus somebody cited some sort of standard, but I am going off memory.
Regardless, here every part of your fridge should be between 32-40°F (0-4.4°C) and we definitely don't have guidelines for what should go where - the fridge internals are presumed to be reasonably uniform, though you will often hear advice against keeping milk in the door shelves if you want it to last longer.
@TechConnectify So it seems like the temperature guidelines are much the same in the US and EU. Any difference in cooling-on-the-counter times I think can be attributed to paternal paranoia putting more emphasis on all this growing up in the EU perhaps due to higher electricity prices.
@TechConnectify
Yup I was totally watching your video and thinking how cold?! Like, almost freezing!
If we tried to get ours that cold, everything near the walls would start to freeze. We have a pretty standard built-in fridge, nothing fancy.
I am not sure now how cold ours is (I have some cute little Bluetooth sensors that do logging, hmm..), but whatevwr it is, our fresh German milk is microfiltered, and lasts a surprising amount of time, way longer than standard British milk.
@TechConnectify I have just discovered it has a 'Super' button!! How did I never notice... Apparently that's for when putting some warmer stuff in, to make it work harder for a while. TIL.
@TechConnectify I’ve heard a lot about how big a gamechanger the refrigerator was in postwar America. That was us making all those crazy gross looking jello aspics filled with savory ingredients—it was a way to show off that you had a refrigerator. It would certainly be interesting to hear about the cultural impacts of refrigeration elsewhere in the world.
@TechConnectify I wonder how much of this might be an age thing. I was always told "Never put hot things in the fridge/freezer!" but I also grew up in the 70s/early 80s and the tech just may not have been as good then as it is now.
@kat@TechConnectify There could well have been a big jump in tech between the 70s and the 90s that made later fridges better at cooling so there was less temperature drop so the warnings just didn't make sense any more.
Or possibly I grew up with an old fridge that kinda sucked even for the time. It's been decades, so I don't remember well enough to be able to say.
@TechConnectify size is almost certainly a factor; a lot of the US has bigger houses = bigger kitchens = bigger fridges, i'd say mine is possibly a quarter the capacity of your average US refrigerator, and it's not especially small, but that's just a guess
there typically isn't all that much room to squeeze a hot tray in even if you wanted to, at least not without rearranging
Like, sure, don't go right from the oven into the fridge. But as soon as it's cool enough for the fridge to take over, I'm putting it in there to get it down to safe temps as fast as possible!
@TechConnectify@Nitrousoxide Absolutely, I put things in the fridge basically as soon as possible because I value food safety above some minimal loss in efficiency. But most people seem to still approach safety and hygiene as a matter of vibes.
@TechConnectify My mum had her last fridge returned twice because she could hear the fan in it. Definitely a different fridge culture. Efficiency and noise are top priority for most, everything else derives from that.
@veith wow, fan noise from a fridge has been the norm for like 50 years, here. It's usually droning on a little bit unless it's defrosting and nobody I know seems to mind
@TechConnectify I have a wider theory that the prevalence of forced air furnaces primes North Americans to accept high background noise levels. So far my mum hasn’t visited during heating period but I bet she would be losing it completely when the heat would come on at night.
@TechConnectify Doesn't it result in a huge power draw though, when (if possible) you could just leave the thing to cool down naturally before fridging it?
@Vermoot no, certainly not how I would define "huge"
Even a ridiculously giant American fridge will draw maybe 300 watts when running. Mine draws about 150-180.
Refrigerators are very energy-efficient appliances, and if it needs to run for an extra hour it'll cost at most a few cents even with rather expensive electricity
@TechConnectify Like others have said I think this is a size thing (at least in my experience). Our fridges are generally not huge - so if you don't let things cool a bit then it will be near other things, re-awaken the dormant bacteria on those, and those will spread while things cool back down.
Bigger fridge means more space means less chance of your warm fudge being an alarm clock for your chicken sammich
@Nuggette I think it's less of a size thing and more of a technology difference.
If, as comments suggests, the typical European fridge is like my little red fridge with the embedded evaporator, then it simply cannot move that much energy out of it that quickly.
Pretty much every American fridge has a fan-forced evaporator which can very quickly chill its insides. Usually the evap is in the freezer, with an air duct between the freezer and fridge compartments.
@Nuggette I've seen plenty of small, cheap upright fridges with this arrangement - it's been the norm for a solid 50+ years. And I'm talking like very small fridges in vacation rentals and extended stay hotels.
I genuinely had never seen the embedded evaporator arrangement prior to getting the little red fridge, and can say for certain that to American tastes it's pretty much unacceptable
@TechConnectify I'm in the states and I tend to let leftovers sit for a bit as to try to not blast things next to it with heat and to try to dump less water into the fridge. For cooking stuff I just shove it in though.
@TechConnectify@j_vdb85 Yeah, I mean insect screens. They are still not very common. To be fair, they have a lot of older architecture that (while beautiful) doesn’t have standard window sizes so it would require a lot of custom screens.
@marcmcd I see very little reason to install insect screens, tbh. Some people have them, but most do not. We have relatively few annoying insects. We don't have any that transmit serious diseases, as far as I know. Although that might change with climate change. I'm hearing mosquitoes might become more common over the next few decades.
@claudius You don’t have flies? Or moths? Or beetles? Or spiders? I mean, I like being able to have my windows open for fresh air at night without a million bugs flying in to the light.
@marcmcd occasional flies and moths, yes. We just capture them and bring them outside. Spiders are pretty small, here, and they help fight the occasional other insect, so they can just stay inside. Bugs rarely get in here at all, sometimes with the laundry.
We keep it pretty dark here, once the windows are open, that's probably a habit that formed alongside not using insect screens.
@TechConnectify It wouldn't occur to me to put something in the fridge that was hotter than room temperature. I'll pop it in the fridge once the temp difference in the room no longer cools it. I don't like the idea of introducing a lot of humidity from hot food either, but that's probably an old-fashioned habit.
@TechConnectify I suspect that one reason might be that most people don't keep track of whether their fridge stays at the appropriate temperature at all and therefore don't notice that it might get to warm, and also that the actual risk of that is relatively small so consequences are rare.
@TechConnectify I also wonder whether a car dependent lifestyle that means you only do a big shop every fortnight or something like that might make a difference, since you would have to keep things in the fridge for longer. I live above a supermarket and rarely have things in my fridge for more than a few days.
@captainchaos oh I absolutely think that our car-dependence and supermarkets built under that paradigm are the main reason our fridges are so huge.
I think most of us do grocery shopping about weekly, and with a family of four you'll need a big fridge to hold all that stuff - plus, you'll need it to be able to quickly cool contents back down from the journey home
@TechConnectify Most recipes over here specify "leave until at room temperature and then refrigerate until set" or the like.
My fridge – large by European standards and with no freezer area – has a button for if you're putting warm things in it ("PowerCool™") to take the mean temperature down from 3°C to 0°C for 20 minutes or so.
I confess that it's so drummed into me that you let food cool before you put it in the fridge, it never occurred to me that USians don't!
@TechConnectify I’m not sure how I would chill something without using the fridge. For some things an ice bath makes sense. I’m not chilling all the bottles of beer I just bought in an ice bath before I put it in the fridge. And probably wouldn’t work for your fudge.
@TechConnectify EU, I’ve been taught to not put hot things in the fridge. It seems to stem from ye olde fridges being crap but today translates well into not wasting energy and preventing ice forming.
@TechConnectify you absolutely get fridges that have that. It is also a common item in comparisons and tests. But I would not say that it's the default, here.
@TechConnectify the reason we don’t do that is because we’re taught not to - no matter how good your fridge, the temperature in the immediate area around the hot stuff will peak for a while, heating up adjacent food above the minimum temperature.
@BartV sure but - get this - American fridges have had fan-forced air movement for decades.
I mean, I just showed in my video how you can put 17 liters of room-temp water in them and their internal air temperature rises by maybe 1°C for a while.
Most American fridges make the cold air in the freezer and move it into the fridge as needed. It takes a lot to overwhelm one
@TechConnectify Americans sure like their things oversized, but in the case of a fridge I have to agree with you that this actually sounds like a good idea ;-)
If the mechanism is removing heat from the hot food, then the fridge is doing its job.
How quickly heat goes in vs how quickly heat comes out is a balancing act.
But if you put five gallons of boiling water into an empty fridge / freezer and it cools it down to cold / frozen, did you overload the fridge? Nope. You just gave it a lot of work to do. It’s an appliance meant to do work.
It probably works more efficiently under load (lots of heat to remove) than maintaining cold temperature.
@TechConnectify I’ve heard this too (don’t put non-room temperature stuff in the fridge or it’ll heat the rest; haven’t heard the thermal shock thing), and I think it’s just some thing people keep repeating without thinking (often the same people who don’t set their fridges to the Correct™ ≤4°C as is being recommended for ≥8 years now…). I can’t imagine they’d make a special fridge for the European market that Doesn’t Fridge Well.
@at loads of people are confused as to why I find the little red fridge novel - embedded evaporators like that are definitely not common here at all aside from mini-fridges.
I'm becoming increasingly certain that, indeed, our fridges fridge more better.
@TechConnectify I know that I can put a bowl of just-boiled pasta in the fridge and have it cooled within 30 minutes. Or wine that maybe sat in the car too long while running groceries can be chilled in half an hour in the freezer.
@TechConnectify I put warm things in my fridge frequently and without any really obvious problems. From my food handlers permit I recall ice baths as the step before putting warm things like soup in the fridge to minimize their time in the “danger zone”. Perhaps an ice bath would be a good idea for a fridge that can’t handle a large warm item?
@TechConnectify that’s interesting, I’m a kiwi and maybe it was something taught or I just intuited. But then when I went to cookery school it was a specific food safety lesson. If you wanted to chill hot stuff you needed a blast chiller that could handle the extra heat.
@JimmyKip I think this is a big part of it - while definitely not up to blast chiller levels of air movement, most American fridges have incorporated fans for many years.
For most designs this is necessary (to move air between the freezer and fridge as all the cooling capacity is in the freezer compartment) and had the side-benefits of making internal temperatures uniform and helping to chill things faster
@TechConnectify One of the things I enjoy about your videos is these odd design differences that exist in what is sometimes easy to assume is (at least for the west) quite a homogeneous world.
@JimmyKip I'm glad you do! I always feel a little embarrassed when I make the assumptions that I do - I definitely assumed our way of fridge-making was copied elsewhere, just with smaller designs, so hearing that the red fridge was ordinary to many caught be off-guard - but every time I uncover one of the many cross-cultural quirks, it's its own kind of fun and interesting!
@TechConnectify The same applies to LatAm: it's considered a big 'no no' to put anything above room temperature on the fridge because 'it's bad for the fridge'. It seems that being overly cautious with household appliances is the norm rather than the exception.
@TechConnectify French here, I'm a bit surprised with all the reactions about how the red fridge is similar to european standars.
Here in France I noticed that both type of fridge exist ! My parents 30 years old Brandt fridge was with a mecanical termostat (going from "1" to "9"... 9 being the coldest) but I also noticed a lot of electronical fridge / freezer like in USA ! At my aunt house, also my friends house... Maybe it is specific to France to have electronic controlled fridges ?
@TechConnectify we put pots of hot stuff in the fridge all the time. No issues. You can tell there’s extra humidity in there afterward for the next few cycles, but it works.
@TechConnectify
Unrelated to this post, but I have one of those cheap white electric kettles you’ve featured a few times. It failed in a way that appears to allow it to not stop power properly once the water boils, looks like ot can keep power going without water in the kettle, and can even allow the switch to stay depressed without the kettle in place at all. It’s cheap enough I’m not going to bother to figure out what’s actually wrong or attempt to fix it.
If that’s interesting to you I could ship it to you. Might not make any interesting content, but I figured I’d offer before I just bin it - I’m not comfortable donating it for obvious reasons.
@TechConnectify I am not sure it's so much of a EU vs US divide as it is a class divide. I have the "bad" fridge here in Germany and grew up with bad ones but I have friends with the "American" one.
@TechConnectify I'd wait for it to be around room temp to put it in there, partly just to not actively warm up other stuff in my fridge itself. This is what the manual for my fridge says, though it's specifically in the energy saving tip section:
@TechConnectify Could be a energy efficiency thing. I know a bunch of new kitchen stuff that I have bought that were considerably weaker than it its older variant so that it gets a better energy ratings. I had a stove where you couldnt use more than 2/4 of the plates because that would make its rating worse.
@TechConnectify I've always been warned against it (like, "don't put the left-overs in the fridge until they're near room-temp") because EVERY FRIDGE IN EUROPE is (or was in the past 4 decades) made just like the red fridge. I once thought "F it, what could go wrong!" and put a large pot of near-boiling stew in the fridge overnight. The fridge was warm in the morning. Serves me right!
@TechConnectify European here. I think it's less "don't do it, the fridge can't handle it" and more "don't do it, the power bill will be expensive!", at least that what's my dad used to tell me. Everyday I would put the fridge temp to 4°C (I like my drinks cold), and he would up it back to 6°C :meltingface:
@TechConnectify Also, putting warm things into the fridge without letting them cool to room temp first is a better food safety practice (assuming your fridge can handle it). Otherwise items will likely be outside the safe zone for over 2 hours, especially if you don't check it often.
@TechConnectify I really think your first test in the video is flawed (as you mentioned yourself) because there was nothing else in the fridge. With enough thermal mass, the temperature would not nearly rise as much.
So, in short: adding 1kg of warm mass to a fridge with 20kg of cold stuff would equalize to fairly cool on its own with no compressor at all. Yes that compressor then still needs to get 21kg from fairly cold to cool, which takes time, but I don't think it's all that bad.
@claudius I can understand where you're coming from, but the same amount of added heat energy went into the system which the compressor would have to deal with either way.
With other thermal mass, it might have delayed it switching on, but the energy from the cans would still overwhelm the system in time
@claudius as a different example, just a few days ago I loaded it empty with 12 bottles of beer. That took it a little over 2 hours to cool down.
If there were more stuff in the fridge, the temperature might not have spiked so high, but to get back down to the set point would take the same amount of energy.
Some real-world scenarios probably occur where this buffer is enough to stay below food-safe temps - like when I added the 16 additional cans. But I bet doubling 48 to 96 would go as poorly
@TechConnectify Presuming i'm reading a recipe written by someone living in the same place, i'd just assume they know what they're doing and that it's important to put it in the fridge right away.
I just avoid making a habit of putting warm things in the fridge since there's no real downside to just letting it cool to room temp for an hour first.
@TechConnectify I think this is largely just a thing passed on from the previous generation, maybe it took a bit longer for good fridges to become the norm in Europe?
I’ve put boiling point stuff in and it’s never been enough to push it above the 2Cº I’ve set it to. It is a pretty expensive Miele fridge though
I guess it would save energy to leave things out, but especially for leftovers, I want to stay out of the danger zone as much as possible for the best chance of keeping a long time
@TechConnectify it’s been 20 years, but when I went to the UK… just about all the fridge’s I encountered didn’t get much cooler than room temp anyway, so… maybe they don’t do that.
@TechConnectify actually I've always been told to not put your things into the fridge because it heats up the fridge, so yeah...
I would believe that nowadays we can also buy modern fancy fridges with fans and whatnot but usually we use them until they break and the old ones last long...
@TechConnectify this happens on bake-off sometimes. Some tries to chill something directly out of the oven into the freezer and it doesn't work as well as people leaving it to air-cool first.
@TechConnectify It's not about the ooomph of the fridge. Room temp to fridge is fine. Actually hot to fridge isn't (you'll heat up stuff next to the hot stuff and that has contamination and spoiling issues associated with it).
Same reason that you're meant to chill stuff in the fridge before transferring to the freezer.
I seriously doubt that those concerns don't apply to US fridges, no matter how big they are or how good the heat pump is because to avoid them you'd need a blast chiller.
@markdennehy (most of our fridges have fans moving air around the compartment and/or between the fridge and freezer, and this forced convection is a big part of the oomph - I put the warm glass pan of fudge in and within an hour the sides were cold).
@TechConnectify Yeah, but the damage doesn't take an hour to do. Just cycling up and down past 4C is the problem (which is why stuff on the door goes off faster).
You could put a temperature probe into food in the fridge, put something hot in beside it and see how much thermal energy gets transferred before the overall temp falls back below the 4C limit I suppose, but you'd have to be some crazy youtuber type to do something like that...
@markdennehy and if you didn't watch my video on the little red fridge, an American fridge can easily swallow up 48 cans of sparkling water (which is a little over 17 liters) without significantly elevating the overall interior temp - in fact, all measured points in the fridge stayed food-safe.
But, the little red fridge was absolutely overwhelmed, and apparently that design is fairly common in other parts of the world.
I feel sorry for places where such weedy fridges are the norm!
@TechConnectify: I believe it's related to how refrigerators used to not be self-deicing. Putting a steaming hot dish into a closed cold closet will make a lot of ice, and then you'll have to manually deice the darn thing that much more often.
@TechConnectify both my current Samsung and my previous Zanussi-Lehel (one of the last fridges made in Hungary) could handle it. I think it's more about power consumption than anything else.
@TechConnectify I rarely read the comments, and this is really interesting stuff. Thanks for posting it here, and for being engaged on Mastodon in general.
If I can fit it on a shelf in the fridge, it's going in. Rice and giant hot bubbling cauldrons of stew get a small delay and put into smaller tubs.
My UK fridge/freezer is only a few years old but it looks the same as almost every cheap UK fridge all the way back to the 1970's, so I suspect the parts have not changed much.
However, there are plenty 'American Style' ones now.
@TechConnectify US citizen here. Yeah our fridges can pull a large stone-wear dish filled with lasagna from 160 (F) internal temp to 35 (F) in like 3 hours. That’s with the dish itself being north of 180 (F) when it’s put in the fridge. And without warming anything else up too much, if at all. I’ve done it many times before without even thinking about it.
@TechConnectify I still feel bad for kicking off that particular continental drift.
To answer the question, I think™ most often people will leave stuff out of the fridge until room temperature and then fridge it. But I'm quite certain the fridge would handle it in most cases. However, for the somewhat common smaller models (the ones we call table model) I'm not as sure.
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