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Getting out of the fridge early

Very often when you're cooking, you need to take food or preparations out of the fridge, to use them in the recipe in progress.
There's nothing tricky about this: you just take them out of the fridge and use them, usually immediately, in the recipe.

But is this really a good method?

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Keywords for this post:Cold Cooking Method Tip Storage Temperature

Last modified on: November 24^th 2025

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The whole point of keeping food in the fridge is the temperature it brings to the food - usually 4°C (39°F) - which means a shelf life that would be impossible at room temperature.
Taking food out of the fridge at 4°C to add it to a recipe, or to cook it right away, is not a big problem in itself, but there are 2 small problems:

1) Undercooked meat and fish

First of all, if you do this with a piece of meat or fish that you put in the oven right away, it will cook, of course, but not as well as if it were at room temperature.

Once in the frying pan or saucepan, the outside of the piece heats up very quickly, while the inside takes much longer to come to temperature.

To compensate, we prolong cooking, which dries out the surface and sometimes results in an overcooked or undercooked center.

The thermal shock of a very cold piece coming into contact with a very hot pan can also stiffen muscle fibers, especially on fast-cooking meats (steak, escalope, poultry) and harden them unnecessarily.

2) Loss of energy

It's also a (small) waste of energy for nothing.

Imagine, for example, that you want to boil 1 liter of milk to make a rice pudding: your milk, taken out of the fridge at 4°C, will take longer to heat than if it were at room temperature.

What to do?

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