Commonsense Food Safety

With the heat finally here and thoughts turning to picnics and outdoor cooking, I thought it would be useful to review what every cook should know about food safety. Food safety rules have four big "C"s -  chill, clean, cross-contamination, and cook - but the biggest "C" may be Confusion. With all sorts of warning labels and vicious bugs with complex, Latin names, it's hard to keep straight what you really need to do to prevent food related illnesses.

The following is a list of the commonsense techniques that will do well for most of us. For those of you cooking for anyone in a High Risk Group - defined as the elderly, infants, toddlers, and anyone with chronic disease effecting the immune system - it is worthwhile to do comprehensive research in food safety. I would recommend the site, www.FoodSafety.gov. It's readable and thorough.

Before we get to specifics, you do need to memorize two important numbers: 40 degrees and 140 degrees. This is the danger temperature zone at which bacteria multiply really happily. Remember "life begins at 40". 

Start thinking of food safety when youre buying the food, not just when you've gotten it home. At the store, look for four things. Is there a clean smell to the food? Is any perishable food well packaged, e.g. is the meat leaking? Are cold foods chilled, and frozen foods really frozen? Finally, is there any rotting food still for sale, or worse, mixed with fresh food?

Once home, any perishable food should be stored immediately in the refrigerator and freezer. Both of these should be checked regularly for proper temperature. The refrigerator should be at 40 degrees or below. To keep food properly frozen and in optimal condition, the freezer should be 0 degrees or lower. You can buy refrigerator/freezer thermometers with the appropriate ranges marked in red, for as little as $5.00.

When starting to prepare food, remember the dangerous temperature zone.  You dont want the food to stay in the zone much longer than 2 hours. This is why you do not thaw food on the kitchen counter. Thaw in the refrigerator, microwave, or in the sink surrounded by cold water.

During food preparation it's not hard to keep things clean. First, foremost, and always, the single best thing to do to keep food safe is to wash your hands in the hottest water you can stand. If you like - especially when cutting raw meat and poultry, garlic, and hot peppers - use latex gloves. They're easily found in the drugstore. I also use gloves when kneading dough - you can remove the glove and answer the phone without getting raw dough over everything.

Cutting boards are a primary source of cross contamination. My advice is to buy two, making at least one a plastic board that can fit in your dishwasher for sanitizing. Wooden boards should not go in the dishwasher. Using a laundry marker, or other permanent ink pen, mark one board for meat and poultry, and use the other for produce, etc.

If you like a wooden board, use it for any food that can be served raw, and use a plastic board for protein. Mark one side of the protein board to use only for poultry; use the other side for other meat and fish. When a dishwasher isn't suitable, wash the boards with soap and water followed by a rinse made from a mixture of 1 ½ teaspoons of either Clorox bleach or white vinegar per pint of water.

Remember that cross-contamination also occurs with knives and other utensils, kitchen counters, towels, or your bare hands, so these need to be washed between uses. For example, you would not use the same platter to carry raw meat out to a grill that you would use to carry the cooked meat back in. For extra care, use the rinse described above on all these utensils.

While there are a lot of bugs out there, a few foods cause the most problems in the home kitchen - poultry and eggs, ground beef, pork, and fish. It's good to remember the temperatures these foods need to reach to disarm any bugs.  Cook poultry so it reaches 165 degrees in its thickest part, any ground beef dish to 155 degrees, pork to 150 degrees, and fish to 140 degrees. Eggs should be cooked until the yolk starts to firm.

Once eaten or cooked, remember to get the food out of the temperature danger zone by either chilling or freezing it. Try to get the food as cool as possible before putting it in the refrigerator. The refrigerator can't do a good job of chilling really hot food. So if the food is still really hot, stir it until cooled down or put it into an ice bath.