But it's just spent 30-45 minutes at boiling point. If you keep the cooker closed and only use clean utensils to remove rice I'd say the risk is pretty low.
My understanding is the Bacillus cereus spores aren't guaranteed to be entirely killed off in typical rice cooking times (also, 30-45 minutes boiling seems long for cooking even 4 cups of rice in my rice cooker). If not killed, the remaining spores become a problem.
The contamination (spores) come in the rice you buy.
My model recommends the warming function for up to 40 hours, but I'm sure Japanese people who eat rice every day get poisoned all the time, and we should all follow FDA guidelines that say to throw out all of our food if it is in the fridge for longer than 2 days or out at room temp for 4 hours. No wonder people think that cooking or grocery shopping are intimidating with that mentality...
I wouldn't leave it for that long, but mostly because of degradation in texture.
The sarcasm is how I stop myself from getting too angry over the ridiculous US food safety guidelines that discourage people from cooking and encourage waste. Sadly those are treated as gospel all over the Western Internet. I can imagine the comments on TKG...
Yeah 4 days is stretching it, was more commentary on rice taste/quality vs rice stored in fridge and reheated. As for 12 hours, I know it's the guidelines, but plenty of people I know grew up eating multiday room temperature stored rice. IIRC China released data on bacillus cereus outbreaks a year ago, and they had <10 deaths and a few 1000 hospitalizations over 10 years from a billion rice eaters - cause was primarily poor food handling in cafeterias. Risk:reward wise, 2-3 days works for me, but I also have pretty strong stomach when travelling.
