Around two hours if you get distracted and leave cooked food out after dinner or for a party buffet at home have a policy to take care to refrigerate the leftover foods after roughly two hours when the danger of contracting sickness from perishable food begins to increase fast if the ambient temperature is over 90 degrees especially in the sun the food shouldn t be left.
Refrigerated salad dressing left out.
Usually a few weeks maybe up to two months.
Salad dressing usually will not stay fresh for very long at room temp.
I have often wondered if salad dressing really needs to be refrigerated.
The best way to preserve it is to keep it in a lunchbox with a tiny amount of cloth wrapped dry ice or ice cubes wrapped in cloth.
This applies both to salads made with leafy greens like lettuce spinach and kale and to salads made with cooked foods such as potato salad pasta salad egg salad and chicken salad.
Salad dressings sold refrigerated last much shorter than their shelf stable counterparts.
Like me you might wonder which ones really need to be refrigerated so you can free up some shelf space.
Most commercially processed salad dressings not natural types are low ph acidic products and are also pasteurized using specification for low acid foods.
Salads can be safely left out at room temperature for about two hours or one hour if the temperature is above 90 degrees fahrenheit.
The cubes will melt however and make everything soggy so i d go with the dry ice.