You Can Never Be Too Careful With Food

Food safety advice is a little like Muzak, frequently flowing in one ear and out the other. How often have we been reminded to wash our hands while working in the kitchen, and to keep hot food hot and cold food cold?

Not often enough, apparently. Food-borne illnesses strike hundreds of thousands of people a year, with more than half of those cases occurring at home.

Sharon Greenman, food program coordinator with the Seattle-King County Health Department, offers the following advice for the home cook:

Wash your hands thoroughly with warm soapy water BEFORE you touch anything used to prepare food, BEFORE you touch food that will not be cooked and AFTER you work with raw meat, fish and poultry.

Remember the “danger zones,” or the temperature ranges in which germs grow quickly and toxins are created. Cold foods should be kept under 45 degrees, hot foods above 140 degrees. Greenman says the best investment a home cook can make is to buy a thermometer to verify those ranges.

Items you might not think to be dangerous when left at room temperature include cut melons (a melon should be chilled and rinsed before being cut), bean sprouts, cooked rice and cooked beans. If any of these items sit at room temperature for more than three hours, throw them out, Greenman cautions.

Following a meal, store hot leftovers in shallow, uncovered containers (metal pans cool food faster than plastic). To speed the cooling process, the food should be no more than three inches deep (a roast might be cut into smaller pieces, for instance). Put a lid on the container only after the leftovers are thoroughly cooled. (It takes food longer to cool than you might think - 48 hours for a five-gallon pot of soup, for example.)

Avoid cross-contamination, where germs from one food (say, raw chicken) get into another (say, lettuce), rendering the second unsafe to eat. Get in the habit of storing raw meats below raw produce in the refrigerator. Never return cooked meat to a plate of raw meat. Wash knives and cutting boards with hot, soapy water (or better yet, bleach) between uses.

Monitor cooking temperatures. Pork should be cooked to at least 150 degrees, ground beef to at least 155 degrees, poultry to at least 165 degrees (gauged from the thickest part of the food). Everything else that is cooked should be heated to 140 degrees before eating it.

Thawing should take place in the refrigerator unless you are immediately moving from thawing food to cooking it. Food should be reheated to a temperature of 165 degrees on the stovetop or in the oven; add 25 degrees on to that minimum for cooking food in the microwave oven, since the appliance tends not to heat evenly.