How do pizzerias leave food out for hours and hours? iin?

Whenever I leave food out 2 hours I get food poisoning because dairy can't be left out for more than 2 hours but I go to pizzerias and they have them out for like 6+ hours

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Comments ( 4 )
  • girlinadarkcorner

    There's a range of temperatures known in the food industry as the "danger zone" which is 40-140 farenheit, and any food kept in that range for long enough will become unsafe to eat. as long as they can keep it's temp high enough it will be safe for a while.

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  • bbrown95

    I've noticed one of my favorite pizza places that was located in the mall had them in a glass display case for however long it took for all of the slices to be sold, and somehow it still tasted great after they threw it in the oven for a couple of minutes! I suspect girlinadarkcorner is right about how it stays safe to eat.

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  • Boojum

    Cheese is a dairy product, but the reason for cheese ever becoming a thing is that it remains edible for weeks, months or even years without refrigeration.

    Tomato-based sauces are acidic, and the pathogens that cause food poisoning don't multiply well in an acidic environment. If you leave a container of pasta sauce out for a few days, it will go mouldy on the top surface, but its acidity means that it's highly unlikely that it will have become a culture of the bacteria that cause food poisoning. Also, the sauce on a cooked pizza has a very low moisture content, and that too inhibits the growth of pathogens.

    Bread obviously goes mouldy if left sitting around for too long, but that takes more than a few hours.

    Finally, commercial pizza ovens operate at or above 660°F (350°C). A pizza is only exposed to that intense heat for a couple minutes at most, but because they're thin, a pizza is essentially sterile when it comes out of the oven. A cooked pizza would need to be handled in an extremely inept way for food poisoning pathogens to contact the pizza and begin to multiply. And by inept, I mean something like handling raw meat with bare hands, immediately smearing fingers along the exposed sides of pizza slices, and then leaving them to incubate in a warm display cabinet for a few hours.

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  • olderdude-xx

    The cases are specifically designed to keep the food at safe temperatures, or they change the food out with a certain frequency.

    My wife is the actual cook for a school (about 800 lunches a day), and there are 5 other people doing different jobs. They have to carefully monitor temperatures and food exposure times, and must be able to quickly recognize if one of the cold stations or hot stations is not working right.

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