Of course everyone's approach to food safety is different.
Here's one of America's most respected food scientists on why it's so important to cool homemade stock quickly.
"Let me emphasize, then, that it is indeed essential for safety's sake to cool your stock as quickly as possible to prevent the growth of bacteria." Robert Wolke
It's so easy to cool it quickly with a water bath or with ice. The risk/reward with just letting it sit out for hours doesn't make much sense to me.
Of course everyone's approach to food safety is different.
Here's one of America's most respected food scientists on why it's so important to cool homemade stock quickly.
"Let me emphasize, then, that it is indeed essential for safety's sake to cool your stock as quickly as possible to prevent the growth of bacteria." Robert Wolke
It's so easy to cool it quickly with a water bath or with ice. The risk/reward with just letting it sit out for hours doesn't make much sense to me.
Well, I clearly don't agree with Breezy's attitude. She is probably correct that illness is rare from this practice, but it is not because people have a resistance built up from following years of poor practices, it is because there is a limited potential for problems and it requires a number poor practices to end up with infected food at the point of eating.
C. perfringens is the only spore forming bacteria I am aware of that can cause problems in properly cooked foods. All the rest are killed. (Botulism is not a problem in this type of cooking).
Once cooked, if the spores are present, thay may vegetate into the bacterial form and grow very rapidly. Ingestion of large amounts of these organisms cause the food poisoning. This is not a disease caused by the toxin like botulism.
This is the reason why rapid cooling is important. Over 2 hours under 140 degrees and sufficient growth can occur to cause illness if ingested.
However... and this is a big however... reheating the stock to over 165 degrees again will kill any bacteria that had formed. This is the reason why, IMO, there is little anecdotal evidence of problems with soups and stocks; we almost always reheat them to the boiling point.
The foods most commonly associated with this food poisoning are gravy based dishes, rice and meats, where fear of drying or changing the consistency of the food often leads us to just reheat to 120-140. If the the food was previously improperly cooled and then improperly reheated, this food poisoning has an excellent chance of occurring.
And that is the problem with Breezy's thinking, because she will also leave her rice, gravy, and ham out for several hours without concern.
So Jenny's point is very well taken that the amount of effort to follow good cooling practices is minimal compared to the consequences of guessing wrong.
http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~mow/chap11.html