Have a successful picnic by keeping your food hot or cold.
A picnic is a good --- not to mention cost-effective --- way to change your normal dining scenery. Whether you are taking someone on a picnic date, hosting your family reunion picnic-style or just having a picnic with friends, the considerations about keep hot food hot and cold food cold are much the same. Poor planning could result in a spoiled picnic with warm chicken salad and melted ice pops. Not only does the wrong temperature for food turn off your appetite, it can also make you sick.
Instructions
Hot Foods
1. Cook the hot food right before you are about to leave for a picnic. Although you can save time by making a warm meal in advance, you do not to have to stick your warm meal into the refrigerator and then attempt to reheat it before your picnic.
2. Put the hot food, while it is still hot, directly into aluminum foil. Wrap and seal the food. Aluminum foil is effective for trapping the heat in food. If you transfer hot food into a plastic product, such as a plastic container or baggie, the heat can potentially melt the product. However, if you are making a hot meal that is too messy to place into aluminum foil, such as spaghetti and meatballs, you can transfer the hot food into a glass dish or bowl and cover it with the foil.
3. Wrap a dish towel around your aluminum-wrapped, hot food. A dish towel provides extra insulation, so that the heat does not escape from the food.
4. Transfer your hot dishes into a cooler. Coolers are not just used to keep foods cool but they are also used to keep warm dishes hot. The difference is you do not add ice into a cooler that is used to keep foods warm.
5. Add heat packs into the cooler. Heat packs emit heat, which gets trapped inside of the cooler to keep your food hot. Place the heat packs on top of the food that you wish to keep hot. Make sure the heat packs never come into direct contact with the food and are always separated by the aluminum foil or dish towel.
6. Remove the hot food when you are ready to eat it at the picnic. Do not take it out of the cooler, unwrap the insulation and open the container preemptively, as this allows all of the heat to escape.
Cold Foods
7. Take your cold or frozen foods out of the fridge or freezer just before you are leaving for the picnic. Do not give the foods you want to keep cold any extra time to thaw, or else they will not stay as cold for as long as you would like.
8. Place the cold food into plastic containers or baggies. Make sure they are well sealed, so that the cold air cannot escape. Wrap an additional layer of aluminum foil over the plastic to help trap the cold.
9. Set your packages and baggies of cold food into a cooler. Fill the cooler with ice. This is a more effective way to keep your cold food cold rather than placing the food containers and bags on top of the ice, which does not surround all angles of the food. Another idea is to add ice packs on top of cold foods that are placed inside of coolers. You may not have a cooler that is large enough to hold a lot of ice, so an ice pack works effectively.
10. Remove the ice and cold food when you are ready to serve it.
Tags: aluminum foil, food cold, food into, into cooler, cold food