Refrigerated Salad Dressing Left Out

Salad dressing usually will not stay fresh for very long at room temp.

Refrigerated salad dressing left out.

The best way to preserve it is to keep it in a lunchbox with a tiny amount of cloth wrapped dry ice or ice cubes wrapped in cloth. Most commercially processed salad dressings not natural types are low ph acidic products and are also pasteurized using specification for low acid foods. They come with a use by or sell by date and that date is a pretty good indicator of how long the mix stays fine. I have often wondered if salad dressing really needs to be refrigerated.

Around two hours if you get distracted and leave cooked food out after dinner or for a party buffet at home have a policy to take care to refrigerate the leftover foods after roughly two hours when the danger of contracting sickness from perishable food begins to increase fast if the ambient temperature is over 90 degrees especially in the sun the food shouldn t be left. When unopened it will stay good at room temperature for a long time as indicated by. Like me you might wonder which ones really need to be refrigerated so you can free up some shelf space. Salad dressings sold refrigerated last much shorter than their shelf stable counterparts.

Usually a few weeks maybe up to two months. This applies both to salads made with leafy greens like lettuce spinach and kale and to salads made with cooked foods such as potato salad pasta salad egg salad and chicken salad.