Hot holding temperature log: free printable sheet

Print this sheet, clip it by the pass and fill in a line every time someone probes the food in a bain-marie, soup kettle, hot cupboard or carvery. Use the button below or press Ctrl+P (Cmd+P on a Mac): only the sheet prints.

How to use the sheet

1. Preheat first. The FSA's Safer Food, Better Business (SFBB) pack says to preheat hot holding equipment before any food goes in. A cold bain-marie spends its first half hour cooling your soup, not holding it.
2. Probe the food, not the dial. The unit's display tells you the air or water temperature. The log needs the food's temperature, taken in the centre or thickest part with a clean, disinfected probe.
3. Stir liquids before probing. Food Standards Scotland's CookSafe guidance points out that soups, stews and sauces vary through the pot, so stir before you take the reading.
4. Write the number. "68" is evidence; a tick isn't.
5. Fill in the action column whenever a reading is under target, then recheck.
6. Initial every line, so you know who checked and can follow up.

Set your check times in your food safety system (for example, when food goes in and every two hours during service) and keep to them. Make sure your probe is accurate too: our probe calibration log has the FSA's iced water and boiling water check.

The rules behind the sheet

England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Cooked or reheated food kept for service or display must be held at 63°C or above. The FSA's guidance allows one exception (in England it's written into the regulations as a defence): food on display, such as a buffet or carvery, can be below 63°C for up to two hours, once. After that, the FSA says to reheat it until steaming hot and put it back in hot holding, or chill it down as quickly as possible to 8°C or below. If it's been out for more than two hours, throw it away. Don't top up old food with a fresh batch, or the clock on the old food gets lost.

Scotland. The Food Hygiene (Scotland) Regulations 2006 require hot-held food to be kept above 63°C, and reheated food to reach at least 82°C unless that would spoil it. CookSafe suggests setting your own maximum display time for hot-held batches, with the probe as your back-up check.

For cooking temperatures, reheating and the full detail, see our guide to hot holding, cooling and reheating temperatures.

When a reading is too low

The SFBB hot holding method gives you three options when a dish isn't hot enough:

• Reheat it until it's a safe temperature and put it back into hot holding. Only do this once.
• Chill it down safely and reheat it later before serving. Our cooling log sheet covers that step.
• Throw it away if you can't do either.

Then stop it happening again: check the equipment is working, try a higher setting or smaller quantities, and retrain whoever was on. Write down what went wrong and what you did. An inspector would rather see a low reading with a clear action next to it than a column of perfect numbers.

Where a paper log falls down

Paper hot-hold sheets get splashed on the pass, go missing, or get filled in at 10pm from memory, which is easy to spot when every reading is 70°C in the same pen. And a low reading on paper only helps if someone reads it in time.

In ShiftComplete, each bain-marie, soup kettle or hot cupboard is set up as a hot-hold point with its own minimum, such as 63°C. Staff log the reading on a phone or the tablet on the pass in seconds, with an optional photo of the probe. Every entry is named and timestamped, anything below your minimum is flagged on the manager's dashboard, and the last seven days are on one screen when the EHO arrives. See digital temperature logs.

It helps you keep the records an EHO asks to see. The temperatures themselves are still your kitchen's responsibility. ShiftComplete costs £1.49 per staff member per month, and it's free for 60 days with no card needed.