Hiii! Have you experienced food borne illness after consuming home cooked rice or your fried rice from your favourite hotel made you sick? Well that culprit can be Bacillus cereus, one of the food-borne disease-causing Bacteria. The endospores are resistant to heat and radiation. Your local restaurants would cook steamed rice one day, then leave the rice out overnight to cook fried rice the next day. If the cooked rice is not properly cooled, then the Bacillus spores can germinate and produce a toxin that can make a person sick.
In our household
The spores are resistant to high cooking temperatures, cooked rice needs to be served immediately or cooled immediately and stored in the fridge within 1hr.
For proper cooling, leftover cooked rice should be placed in shallow containers, no more that 3 inches deep, and put directly into the refrigerator for quick cooling. Don’t cool it on the counter.
The leftover rice should be reheated only once. The reheated rice should be piping hot right till the bottom.
In professional Kitchens
The rice should be cooked thoroughly with core temperature reaching at least 75oC.
The rice has to be cooled (using potable water or ice) from 60oC to 20oC within 2 hrs and from 20oC to 4oC wishing 4hrs or less.
The cooling has to be done using wide shallow containers or reducing the size of portions. The cooked rice needs to be stored in covered containers and away from raw food at a temperature above 60oC or at 4oC or below. The temperature needs to be checked regularly to ensure to be kept at the designated temperature.
If cooked rice have been kept at room temperature;
- For less than 2 hours, they can be refrigerated or consumed before the 4 hours.
- For more than 2 hours but less than 4 hours, they should be consumed but not be returned to the refrigerator.
- For more than 4hrs they should be discarded.
Re-heating:-
The refrigerated rice should be reheated at 75oC as the internal temperature. Left-over rice should not be reheated more than once.
Further:-
- On the advice of FSSAI its preferable to buy packaged sealed or even sized clean fortified rice.
- DART (Detect Adulteration with Rapid Test), can be used to detect adulterated and pure sella rice. Take a teaspoon of the sample in a glass plate and sprinkle a small amount of soaked lime (known as chuna, used in pan) to it. If the rice forms red colour it is adulterated. Pure sella rice does not form red colour.
- The detection of high levels of B.Cereus >103 cfu per gram should result in an investigation of the food handling controls by the food business. Levels more than 104 cfu per gram can cause food borne illness.
Safety is obtained by the application of safety management tools (GMP, GHP AND HACCP) throughout the food chain. Microbiological analysis can be used to support and verify the effective application of these management tools.
References:-
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