Safe to leave 'new' chicken stock in rice cooker for three hours? I'm on a Japanese food kick after starting Midnight Diner on Netflix, and recently purchased a rice cooker. I'm experimenting with the delayed rice setting, and have programmed the device to have my rice ready approximately three hours from now.
Instead of water, I'm using chicken stock from a brand new, unopened box. I'm pretty sure that there is nothing unsafe about this, but the box does say that unused stock should be refrigerated after opening.
Is there any reason to worry about leaving two cups of chicken stock in a rice cooker for approximately two hours before the machine begins cooking?
The packaged stock will be pasteurised, leaving it in a pan for a couple of hours is unlikely to allow a huge amount of bacteria growth from ambient air. Then cooking the rice will boil the stock and kill anything that has grown anyway, so it is perfectly safe. The only drawback sometimes is that the celery stick in a stock introduces a sour taste as it ages but that is with fresh celery (shop bought is likely to be powder-based) and then it only happens after about 5 days in the fridge...