Is there any risk/harm in leaving cooked chicken out for about half an hour?
It would take longer than half an hour to even cool it much anyways, so half an hour on the counter is totally fine, provided it was fully cooked to begin with. The “danger zone” of foods is generally accepted to be roughly 40-140 degrees and you want to keep even cooked food out of this range for extended periods of time. According to NY state health department, for poultry cooked to 165, it must be cooled from temperature of 120 to 70 in 2 hours and then to 45 in another 4 hours. While those guidelines don’t really address the whole “danger zone” of food temperatures very well, they do give you an idea of how even relatively strict guidelines for professional food preparation have a pretty lengthy amount of time thats considered “safe” for cooling food back down.
