Kitchen Safety for the culinarian

Nothing is more important than food safety and sanitation. If you make the most delicious food, but it is tainted with a harmful microorganism...you failed. So much of cleaning a kitchen and protecting the safety and wholesomeness of foods boils down to plain old fashioned cleanliness. To be specific there is a difference between a clean kitchen and a sanitary kitchen. To clean is to simply eliminate the clutter but to sanitize is to clean and go a step further to remove or minimize to a safe level the number of harmful microorganisms present in the foods or food preparation area.

When you purchase or acquire food items, you need to make sure what you acquire has been handled safely. You need to make sure you aren't bringing spoiled foods home. The next most important is that you need to make sure that once you acquire food items, you don't allow them to spoil between the time you acquire them and when you get them home and put away into your pantry or kitchen. Yes, it is a good idea to take a chilled ice chest with you to the store and as soon as you get the food from the supermarket to your car, you put away the items that easily spoil into the ice chest. Ideally, you'd have ice already in the ice chest. You can use empty beverage containers filled with water and then frozen, you don't have to buy ice. Just be sure that you place the meats with the highest safe internal temperature on the bottom and arrange meats up from there. If you have enough room, or better yet, a second ice chest, do this with frozen vegetables under the ice and fresh vegetables on top of the ice.

Don't be that cook that sickens their guests or family. There is a lot to this, and it is good to take a food handler's class either through a company like ServSafe  or at your local health department (many municipalities offer this). You might find continuing education courses at your local community college and other places.

It takes time for harmful microorganisms to multipy in foods due to temperature, but it doesn't take very much time. There are minimum internal temperatures that you can use when cooking potentially hazardous foods (high protein foods). The use of a thermometer helps you to know when you have cooked foods that you have minimized the growth of organisms that cause foodborne illness. Generally, to slow the growth of microorganisms cold foods should be held in an environment (such as in the refrigerator or ice chest) where the air temperature is 40 degrees and below (36 degrees and below for meats). Freezing preserves for long periods of time because frozen foods are cold enough that microorganisms have a difficult time growing. For holding hot foods, bring the internal temperature of the food to the safe minimum temperature for that food and then hold in an environment that is at least 140 degrees. For more information go to https://www.health.state.mn.us/people/foodsafety/cook/cooktemp.html#:~:text=Note%3A%20There%20are%20three%20important,a%20thermometer%20to%20check%20temperatures.

Safe Minimum Internal Temperatures for Foods (all foods in degrees Farenheit):

Ground meats (of any kind)                                                                                 160

Whole cuts of beef, veal, lamb, pork, deer, moose, elk, caribou         145

Poultry and game birds                                                                                         165

Leftovers                                                                                                                      165

Fish and shellfish                                                                                                     145

Eggs, whole                                                                                                                 until whites are firm

Eggs, ingredients in dishes                                                                                   160

Don't cook for others when you are sick unless you want others to be sick too. Especially if you are dealing with diarrhea or vomiting.

If you are reasonably healthy, make sure you wash your hands and clean those nails. If your hands have cuts, cover them with bandaids and then wear food handler's gloves or exam gloves. If you handle raw meats, especially, wash your hands before and after and do not touch anything that is not meat, the cutting board, and the knife you are using to cut the meat. This is very important.

Make sure you clean the area you are working before switching to another type of food to be prepared. So, if I were cutting meat, I'd be sure to clean and sanitize the work area and my utensils and tools before cutting vegetables. This is to prevent cross-contamination. Generally it is better to prepare ingredients for use based on the order of their safe minimum temperature from least to greatest. This means that I would prepare foods that are to be eaten without additional cooking first, then I'd clean and sanitize before I would prepare the next item based on the safe minimum internal temperature (see the section on Time and Temperature Abuse). After proper storage of foods,  and handwashing, cross contamination is the most controllable route to food safety and wholesomeness that is within the power of the culinarian and so there should be no excuse if any of the three mentioned hazards to food safety lead to food borne illness.