Crash Taste answers the small, urgent kitchen questions plainly. Is this still OK to eat? How long has it really been in the fridge? What do I use when I have run out of buttermilk? What is gas mark 6 in Celsius? The kind of thing you look up mid-recipe with floury hands, wanting the answer and not a life story before it.
Who writes this
The pages here are written by Nora Quinn. Nora cooks for a family, cannot stand wasting food, and got tired of scrolling past three paragraphs of preamble to reach a number. When an article says “in my kitchen” or “what I actually do”, that is her. There is more on the author page.
How the food-safety advice is checked
A good part of this site is health-adjacent. Storage times, reheating, defrosting, telling whether something has gone off: get those wrong and someone gets ill. So the facts on those pages are checked against the published guidance, mainly the UK Food Standards Agency and the NHS, before they go up. Where the official line says two days for cooked rice or leftovers, that is what you will read here, not a rounded-up guess.
Two honest points sit alongside that. First, storage times are guidance, not a guarantee. How the food was handled, how quickly it was cooled, and how cold your fridge actually runs all matter more than any single number. Second, the sniff test has limits. Plenty of the bacteria that make you ill leave no smell, no taste and no visible change. So where a page tells you to look and smell, it also tells you where looking and smelling stops being enough. When something is past its use-by date, has been left out too long, or you simply cannot remember, the safe answer is the boring one: when in doubt, throw it out. A binned portion of chicken is cheaper than a bad night, or worse.
This site is a reference to help you decide sensibly. It is not medical advice and it does not replace the official guidance or a doctor. If you are cooking for someone pregnant, very young, elderly or unwell, err firmly on the cautious side, because the people most at risk from a food-safety slip are exactly those people.
Independent, sells nothing
Crash Taste is an independent, privately run project. There is no paid arrangement with any brand, shop or appliance maker. Nothing here is recommended because someone paid for it. When a page names a tool or an ingredient, that is because it does the job, full stop.
The site is funded by clearly labelled advertising and a free newsletter. That changes nothing about the content. A storage time does not get longer because there are adverts next to it.
Contact
Spotted a mistake, or know a figure to be different? Please say so. The quickest way is email to privacy@crashtaste.com. Corrections on the food-safety pages especially are always welcome, and always acted on.