How can I keep hot food hot when transporting it, e.g. to a friend's house or a potluck? I usually just give up and take cold food, but I'd like to have more options.
How to keep hot food hot when transporting it
food-safetystorage-methodtemperature
Related Solutions
Here is my camping strategy. If I'm going for more than a few days, here's what I do.
- Start with a good air tight cooler. (Big enough to hold everything perishable). Forget those "gel packs". Definitely don't get a bag of ice from the convenience store. They melt and mess stuff up. Get a 2 litre bottle, rinse it out, fill it with water and freeze it. (Do this a couple days in advance, if possible). The less air in the better. This won't leak and will stay cold a good time as long as you don't open it.
- Take any raw meat that you're NOT planning on eating on the first day and freeze that too. Put the meat and all the frozen stuff at the bottom and to one side. My bottle of ice goes either directly on top of the meat or right beside it. This way, my meat has at least an extra day or two of grace and I don't need to waste extra space with an ice pack.
- Then layer stuff that isn't frozen, but can handle a little freezing on the next layer. Then work your way up, to any produce being on the top layer. Plan for the coldest stuff to be at the bottom and/or near the ice packs. Depending on what's in there, sometimes I put a towel between the frozen stuff and the non frozen stuff to insulate it a bit better. And prevent produce that shouldn't be frozen from freezing.
- Then on each day, I move the frozen meat for the next day meat away from the ice packs and upward to allow it to defrost (making sure, it's sealed, so I don't get any raw meat juice leaking out).
- On the last day, the water in the bottle can be drank, but once you start emptying it, it'll start melting.
Obviously, minimize the time you keep it open if possible. I realize you said you're going camping tomorrow, so freezing a 2 litre bottle might not happen in time. In this case, I'd switch to multiple smaller bottles and failing that those gel packs. I hate bags of ice, as they melt and make a mess. Finding cheese in a pool of water is never fun. The rest of the stuff would still apply. This usually lasts me quite a few days.
Standard answer is hotel pans and chaffing dishes with alcohol burners for the hot items.
Double hotel pans with ice between them for the cold items.
Coolers work well for storing items before serve. Things that are fried though would do much better in an oven set to the lowest temp, coolers will trap moisture and they will lose their crispness.
Chafing dish
Hotel pans
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Best Answer
Depending on what it is I am transporting I use different methods, and I use the same methods for both hot and cold transport.
The easiest is the towels in a box; lay four towels down in a shallow box, hanging the other ends of the towels out each side of the box, then put your dish or bread or pot or whatever in the box and fold each of the four towels over the food. If you have hot food, lay some more insulation material over the top, as heat rises. If you have cold food, put the box on the seat, not the floor, as the floor will conduct heat from your vehicle up into your food.
I always have a sleeping bag in my rig and I will sometimes wrap food well with towels and then open the sleeping bag and shove the food into it, wrapping the rest of the sleeping bag over the top if hot food and under the bottom if cold. This has worked a lot for frozen foods when I go bulk shopping in the city, holding food frozen food for 4 hours and more.