#3 Seafood

We all know that you should enjoy your seafood dishes when they’re fresh, but do they make for the best leftovers? The secret here is to know how they were stored before they were cooked. If you are eating seafood that was frozen shortly after being caught fresh, then you should have no problem eating it as leftovers.

However, if you are taking home fresh seafood leftovers from a restaurant, you should be very cautious. It doesn’t matter if they were freshly cooked or enjoyed fresh; the longer you leave seafood out in the open, the more it is a magnet for harboring bacteria, and the dish can end up being the cause of foodborne illness. Heating up the leftovers may not manage to kill the bacteria, and you can never be certain how the food was stored despite it being bought fresh.

The FDA strongly advises against keeping seafood that has been out of the refrigerator for more than one hour in warm temperatures or two hours in colder ones. This is due to bacteria being able to multiply fast at temperatures between 40 and 140 Fahrenheit, so no prolonged air exposure on the table is good.