Hi,
I'm curious if there is an industry wide standard for how long you can keep cooked food (soups, sauces, purees... ) in your refrigerators before you need to replace them.
I've worked in two restaurants. The first was fine dining, the current is a gastro-pub. In the fine dining kitchen the golden rule was 4 days; meaning if you prepped a vegetable puree, for example, on Monday then you had better be making it again on Thursday (AT THE LATEST). Being caught putting out food that was older than this was legitimate grounds for losing your job. We would either use it in a staff meal or if that wasn't an option just toss it away. To this day I find a 4 day rule perfectly reasonable.
However, in my current job I get told off regularly for being wasteful when I try to stick to this rule, I've even seen chefs serve food that was several weeks old. I understand different types of prepared foods have different shelf lives based on fat content, salt, acid.. and that a heavily reduced stock will last a bit longer than say a blanched green bean, but are there generally agreed upon standards?
Cheers.