Cool cooked food and get it into the fridge within one to two hours, keep the fridge between 0 and 5°C, and eat leftovers within 48 hours.
Requirement — Food safety (microbiological)
Cool cooked food and get it into the fridge within one to two hours, keep the fridge between 0 and 5°C, and eat leftovers within 48 hours.
How to tell, without a thermometer
- There is no sensory test for this rule, and that is the point: food held too long at the wrong temperature does not necessarily look, smell or taste different
If it has not got there: Throw it away. This is the one rule in this catalogue where the remedy is not 'cook it longer', because cooking does not reverse it.
Important: Cooked rice is the sharpest case: Bacillus cereus toxins form at room temperature and survive reheating. Rice left out for more than an hour goes in the bin.
Why this is the rule
The reheating rule is only as good as what happened before it. Food that spent the evening on the worktop cannot be made safe by any amount of heat, because some of what grows in that window produces toxins that survive cooking. This rule is the storage half of the same problem and it is the half people skip. It matters for air frying specifically because the appliance is so often used for a second round of something — last night's chips, yesterday's roast potatoes — and the question of how those were stored is the one that actually decides whether reheating them is a good idea.
When it applies
This rule governs food in these states: Leftover (reheating).
This outranks any cooking time on this site. Where a cooking recommendation cannot be reconciled with a rule like this one, AirfryerHQ does not publish the recommendation — not with a warning attached, not greyed out, not at all.
Evidence and confidence
- Applies to
- Applies generally
- Why this rating
- Every figure in this rule was read from the FSA's published guidance during this sprint. It is added because the Sprint 1 reheating rule implied a storage standard it never stated.
- Last reviewed
- 2026-08-13
What this does not cover
- Says nothing about commercially packaged chilled food, which carries its own use-by date and is governed by that.
Sources (1)
How to chill, freeze and defrost food safely
Food Standards Agency — UK food-safety authority (United Kingdom (England, Wales and Northern Ireland))
Relied on for: The 0–5°C fridge range, the one-to-two-hour window for getting cooked food into the fridge, the 48-hour limit on leftovers, the four-hour maximum out of the fridge during preparation, and the 24-hour limit after full defrosting.
States this directly
Passage read and verified
Retrieved 2026-08-13 from gov.uk