Temperature Log For Refrigerator Form: Fill & Download for Free

Steak that was in the process of cooking. Let me explain…About 5 years ago, I got into modernist cooking, in particular low-temperature cooking (sometimes known as sous-vide). For those who aren’t familiar, this is a type of cooking where food is vacuum-bagged, and immersed in water held at a very accurate temperature for a comparatively long time, which allows the food to cook to an exact doneness (great for fish, steak and eggs) and without overcooking or losing too much juiciness.However, this was 5 years ago, there weren’t any low-cost consumer-grade immersion circulators on the market like there are now (you can get one now for $100–200, back then the only ones on the market were commercial/prosumer ones upwards of $1k).So I decided to build one, and document the process in a blog (peltierfridge). All I needed was vessel that could hold water at a very precise temperature, big enough to hold the thing I needed to cook, and modify it with a new control system to allow accurate temperature control. I settled on a mini-fridge - the kind of cheap plastic fridges that are popular with students for keeping cool a few sodas, milk, or beer.The thing about these fridges is that they’re based around a thermoelectric module rather than a conventional compressor, and so could be switched between cooling and heating duty, meaning these fridge could run as a hot-box. In fact, because of thermodynamics, these fridges work better as a heater than as an actual fridge.So I drilled a hole for a temperature probe, sealed up all the internal seams with silicone sealant, wired in a microcontroller, and an opto-isolated transistor that could switch the TEC. For good measure I added an LCD display to show the temperatures (because why not).The final thing looked like this.It even had a little USB port over which I could set the target temperature, log data, and tune the PID gains via a graphical interface (interface built on Qt, and communicating over raw-HID via the ROM-based HID functions in the Cortex-M3 micro).Results for fridge-cooked steak were pretty good (note: meat has to be seared in an additional step):So yeah, I cook meat in my fridge. I’m not sure many other people have 6 litres of hot water and a bag of cooking meat in their fridge.(These days I have an Anova circulator that’s faster and easier to clean, so I don’t use the fridge any more)

Food hygiene is a specialist topic. As a nurse working with food (as we served it to patients) we had to take basic level food hygiene… later, as a home manager, I had to supervise the chef. Here are some elements that you don’t worry about at home:Raw meat and vegetables cannot be stored in the same area and the temperatures/ environments in which each must be storedEverything needs to be dated when it was open and came into useTemperature logs for all refrigerators and freezers, updated daily- and what the ranges areUsing different cutting boards (colour coded) to keep foods apart (one for meat, one for veg, etc)What temperatures foods must be cooked to to ensure they are safeWhat cleaning methods are used in different parts of the kitchenHow long different foods keep when refrigerated and frozenHow long foods can be kept after serving before they have to be thrown away (like sandwiches, cakes, etc)That’s just a small list, but it’s all around keeping large amounts of food stored and used safely.

Yes. I have gone along on such inspections. Temperatures are checked on refrigerators, freezers, dry good storage areas are checked, expiration dates, the temperature of the water in the dishwasher, how clean dishes are stored etc. When possible a meal service is often observed, as well as, depending on the funding source, portion sizes and nutrition content will also be assessed, and even menus, to ensure sufficient protein, vegetables, etc.I’ve had to do my own spot checks too, for expiration dates, nutritional variety, etc. and when there are findings, I.e. missing temperature logs, bags of dry good stored too close to the floor, garbage can missing a lid, it’s collaborative process to fix it and bring the facility back into compliance ASAP.