Why can't you refrigerate hot foods immediately?

"Well...Jonah....how about that. So, in other words, we're doing it the way great grandma, grandma and mom did it because that's all we knew. So, I let perfectly good food go to waste last night because I was trying to wait for it to cool down and fell asleep only to wake up this morning to discover that I forgot to put my food away. I bet I won't let that happen again. By the way, it was really good chicken."


"Apparently that procedure (letting hot food cool to room temp first) came about when our home refrigerators were not run by forced air, cooling the cabinet. Back in the old days - there were cooling plates in the back of the fridge and the air slowly cooled to the temperature of the plates. This was slow and inefficient at cooling but it was the best we had at the time. The risk was that if you put hot food in the old refrigerator - it would warm up the entire cabinet including food already stored in there - raising it above the temperature danger zone for hours."

"But now - they work more like an air conditioner in a box - blowing air through cooling coils to actively chill the air and force it around the box. Plus it is thermostatically controlled - so the blower and compressor will run longer when it detects the refrigerator has warmed up.

There have been several articles about home experiments to test what happens if you put hot food into a cold refrigerator - and they all have said that the food already in there does not warm up.

So for me- I just cool things down to a point where they aren't steaming, I put them in small containers so that the inside cools down faster - and just stick it in the fridge."


Those answer are from from Yahoo answers:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100714132417AAu6KVL

What are your thoughts?