Why shouldn't you keep rice and pasta more than 24 hours in the fridge?

Eating every day with a box is heavy and requires perseverance if you want to follow a healthy diet. On Monday, for example, it is a classic to take advantage of the remains of Sunday’s rice dishes. The pasta that has been left over at home the day before is also a guaranteed success in the lunch box, reheated in the microwave the next day.

Now, you have to be careful. As food safety experts explain, pasta and rice should not be kept in the fridge for more than 24 hours. Because? What is the problem? “They seem like very shelf-stable foods, and what’s more, if you eat them four or five days after they’ve been cooked, they taste pretty much the same. We do not realize that they may have bacillus cereus toxins”, Beatriz Robles, dietitian, nutritionist and food technologist, told RAC1.cat.

These toxins, bacillus cereus, cannot be seen or smelled, but “they can cause gastrointestinal discomfort and even uncontrollable vomiting. It usually works fine, but they can cause problems. If we cool and reheat the rice several times, in these cycles of temperature changes the spores of the microorganism can germinate”, says the specialist. Once they germinate they can produce the toxin.

What to do, then, with the remains of rice or pasta? “We can eat them the next day, as long as we refrigerate them immediately and heat them above 75 °C, or we eat them cold in a salad, for example. If we heat them halfway, that is where the danger lies, because the toxins that may have formed are not destroyed,” says Robles. When cold (at 4 °C), since it has been refrigerated and you eat it as it is, the spores do not germinate either and the microorganisms do not proliferate.

In general, in terms of food safety, “food that is not reheated is safer because the more we handle it, the more likely microorganisms will grow. If they overheat, they go through a temperature range that is considered a “danger zone” more times, which is between 4 and 65 degrees,” Lluís Riera, director of the SAIA food safety consultancy, explained to RAC1.cat.

This is explained because the bacteria multiply more easily at medium temperatures, and have more difficulty proliferating when they are below 4 °C or above 65 °C.