Food Safety Question: Room Temp Stock?

Okay, question for the food safety experts out there. Here's the Scenerio:

I spend all day ( 6 hours) simmering about 8 cups of excellent turkey stock. After straining, I leave on the counter in a container for 1/2 hour to reduce temp before refrigerating. ( so far, so good- dreaming of the great soup I'm going to make with this stock!)

Come home from errands almost 24 hours later and see that the container was pushed into a corner and accidentally left out at room temp the whole time. So here's the question :

Would boiling kill any food-borne badness in this stock? Or does it just need to be pitched?
WWCD? ( What Would Chefs Do?)


Deb

toss it out..more than 4 hours in the TDZ..

Yup. It's trash. Sorry, Deb - that's probably the quickest route to food poisoning I can think of. Perfect breeding ground for pathogens.

Well, I pitched it immediately, with the same thought, so it's really moot at this point, but my question still remains:

Brian believes that boiling it ( 212 degrees) would kill anything growing in it. Is that true? Or are there pathogens that can survive boiling?

Deb

Well, I pitched it immediately, with the same thought, so it's really moot at this point, but my question still remains:

Brian believes that boiling it ( 212 degrees) would kill anything growing in it. Is that true? Or are there pathogens that can survive boiling?

Deb

YES. Otherwise, we wouldn't need to refrigerate anything that would eventually be cooked again. Boiling would kill some of the organisms, but not all. Some of them can withstand any level of heat south of nuclear fission. But it's not always the bacteria themselves that are dangerous - sometimes it's the toxins (waste products) they produce that can sicken humans.

Here's a good quote that explains what I just said above, only more clearly. I got this off a chef-to-chef forum.

There are really two ways for those little microbes to make you sick. One is through infection, the other through intoxication. In an infection it is the microbes themselves that make you sick, and yes boiling the stock for a period of time would kill them off. But an intoxication is where the microbes make you sick from the waste products they produce, through feeding, respiration and reproduction. These toxic substances are not always destroyed by boiling. One example is the botulism toxin. It will survive most normal boilings, and there are many others.

Thanks, Marsha! That's exactly what I was looking for as an explanation.

( Brian just says I want to be right... )

Deb