Food preparation safety is one of the most vital rules to follow strictly within your household, as well as in the workplace.
Why Follow Food Preparation Safety?
Food poisoning is an awful illness to come down with. The typical symptoms of food poisoning are lower abdomen pain, vomiting, diarrhoea and more. Although it sounds like a common illness, it’s actually extremely dangerous. Continually being sick can severely dihydrate your body, as well as prevent your body from getting the things it needs from the food that you eat. Meaning some people who come down with severe cases of food poisoning have to be taken to the hospital.
You may have been fooled into believing the myth that you can only get food poisoning from chicken and other poultry. This is also not true; you can get food poisoning from eggs, dairy and even raw fruit and vegetables. Depending on the conditions your foods are left in it can significantly affect whether or not the bacteria on your food multiples enough to give you food poisoning. So if you want to make your home safe from food poisoning and pick up some tips on how you can improve your home food preparation methods, look no further! We’ve come up with a list of the top food preparation safety tips to help you improve food preparation!
Always Wash Your Hands
We will start with the basics. Always ensure you wash your hands before and after preparing food to avoid any contamination. By not washing your hands and touching raw meats or other foods, you can spread bacteria all throughout your kitchen onto other food, utensils and worktops.
Be sure that when washing your hands you use warm soapy water to kill bacteria, and then dry them in order to prevent bacteria growth.
Separate Raw Foods From Ready To Eat
Storing your raw meats and ready to eat food is risky business, it’s very easy for bacteria from raw foods to contaminate your ready to eat food. It can spread via other foods, worktops, knives, other utensils or chopping boards.
With ready to eat food it’s even more risky business, you don’t cook it before you eat it which means you don’t have the opportunity to cook off any bacteria that could’ve been transferred.
Store Raw Meats At The Bottom Of Your Fridge
Similar to our point before, this point goes back to the contamination of ready to eat foods. If your meat comes in damaged packaging and you don’t realise, by storing it on the top shelf of your fridge all of the juices containing harmful bacteria can drop off and contaminate all of the food in your refrigerator.
By storing your meats at the bottom, you eliminate the risk of your meats contaminating anything in your fridge.
Keep Your Cooking Workstation Clean
Before cooking and after cooking be sure that you thoroughly clean your workstation as well as all of the utensils you have used. We recommend Jantex Pro Kitchen Cleaner And Sanitiser to disinfect your area thoroughly.
Be sure to be wary of wooden chopping boards, where they dent and get slices in them over time; it becomes the perfect habitat for harmful bacterias such as salmonella to collect. So when washing chopping boards like this disinfect them and wash them to be extra safe.
Ensure That Chicken Is Never Pink In The Middle
Chicken is one of the most popular meats and can be added to almost any dish. But you should be extremely cautious when cooking it. Chicken is the most common meat to give someone food poisoning. Salmonella is found on all raw chicken, so you have to cook off the bacteria in order for it to not make you ill.
To do this, you need to make sure that the chicken is not pink in the middle, and doesn’t have any pink jelly-like parts of meat on it whatsoever. To make this easier, we recommend dicing up smaller pieces of chicken and cutting them in half while cooking to ensure that the meat is cooked all the way through. Also, make sure that the meat is piping hot otherwise it has not cooked all the way through, and there could still be harmful bacteria.
Don’t Let Food Sit Out In Warm Heat
Unfortunately, food buffets and cold food buffets are the ideal breeding grounds for harmful bacteria. Which is why if you are hiring catering services Northampton for your event you should choose the fresh food prepared option.
Things like potato salad which contain egg and dairy can turn bad when left in warm temperatures such as during the summer. Warm, humid temperatures speed up bacteria multiplication dramatically meaning a few hours in the sun could spoil your potato salad with salmonella. The same applies to meat, if you buy a ready to eat salad from your local supermarket with meat in and leave it in a warm car for a couple of hours, do not eat it! Meat bacteria multiply extremely fast especially during the heat. For picnics to be safe, take cooler bags.
Make Sure All Food Is Piping Hot In The Middle
This applies to all food; if you look closely at the food labels of food that you reheat, it will always say “ensure food is piping hot”. If your food is not boiling hot in the middle, just like your chicken, this means that it has not cooked all the way through. This applies to microwave meals, pizzas, potatoes or anything.
Remember Use By Dates
Use by dates are there for a reason! Even if everything looks fine and smells fine, do not use it! Especially with meats, use by dates are there to tell you this item of produce must be used by this specific date or it will have gone bad by then. Best before dates and use by dates often get confused. Best before dates indicate that this food item will taste best if used before this date, and anytime after that, it will potentially lose colour, taste or shape as it begins to deteriorate.
Whereas a use by date is to tell you that this item should not be used past this date, or it will then be out of date and bad to use.
Keep Your Food Preparation Safe!
So know you know how you can stay safe in the kitchen and minimalise the risks of food poisoning when preparing all kinds of food.
For any information about our birthday party catering Oxford contact our team today for more information! We hope that this article was helpful, if it was then why not share on social media?