Food Safety -A Big Deal
Food safety is a really important topic. Practicing good habits when it comes to cooking and storing our food is just as important to our health as choosing healthy foods. These practices vary from culture to culture and also depending upon what region we come from. Food safety is generally first learned at home, and outside of formal training home cooks will adapt these behaviors and pass them down from generation to generation. As we evolve however, and accept scientific information more willingly, it’s worth it to research some of our habits to see if they are in fact good practices in food safety.
There are two really popular food safety practices that I want to discuss in this post. The first one is washing chicken and the second one is leaving food out to completely cool before storing it in the refrigerator.
Do you wash your chicken?
For many years home cooks all around the world have believed that chicken had to be thoroughly washed before being prepared for cooking. I have found this to be true especially among West Indian & Caribbean cooks. I have witnessed first hand a few of my friends who have a good 15 minute chicken cleaning ‘ ritual’. I’ve seen it soaked in water and vinegar and picked and washed down and lemon squeezed over it etc.
Personally, I’ve never been one to thoroughly wash chicken before I cook it. I will give it a litte rinse and then throw it in a pan and season it before I cook it and occasionally cut off any excessive fatty skin if necessary, but that’s the extent of it. Although lately I have noticed that some of the chicken we are purchasing from the grocery store, appears to still have pieces of the feather in them that need to be cleaned and I will remove those.
After watching a facebook live cooking demonstration and seeing how many people were offended because the chef didn’t “wash” his chicken, I decided to dive into some extensive research on the topic. There is plenty literature both proven and opinion on this topic. However, I think the scientific findings can be summed up in a few short points.
- Extensive research shows that in fact washing chicken is more harmful then not washing chicken. In fact the FDA, NHS, & USDA are all advocates of not washing chicken.
- It’s said that no matter how much washing you do of chicken , you cannot remove the harmful bacteria in chicken by washing it. It can only be removed by cooking it to the correct temperature.
- Food and safety professionals also suggest that, washing chicken can cause bacteria and contaminates to spread around your kitchen. Therefore if you insist on a washing ritual you should clean the surrounding areas and floors with bleach and disposable clothes or napkins immediately after washing it.
Do you wait for your food to cool before refrigerating it?
I know I grew up being told that I should wait until a pot of food like soup or curry or pan of rice or macaroni and cheese, should be completely cold before we pack it into the refrigerator because it is thought that the rapid change in temperature would cause the food to spoil. I am certainly guilty of this habit. I guess it’s been ingrained in my head so much that I have never ever questioned how true it is until now. After the information I found however, I think I will curb those habits going forward.
When I checked out what food and safety experts have to say about the topic, to the contrary, they suggest that leaving our food out for more than two hours can actually be dangerous. They explained that as the food cools to room temperature it has the potential to grow harmful bacteria that can make us sick.
For large pots of soup, that take forever to cool down, they suggest separating it into more shallow containers, which would help it to cool faster (and probably be easier to store than a huge pot) so that it can be refrigerated sooner. Food experts suggest leaving a large pot of soup or any other food out overnight to cool is dangerous and should not be eaten.
Moral of the story, while you shouldn’t pack the food in the refrigerator piping hot, you should not wait for it to reach room temperature before refrigerating it. So this suggests that we should put it in the refrigerator somewhere between piping hot and room temperature, which I would say is about moderately warm and within two hours of cooking it.
Proper food safety practices are very important. None of us want to be responsible for the sickness of a family member or friend having a foodborne illness due to our ignorance of food safety in the kitchen. As home cooks we should always be ensuring the safety of the foods we eat because if we think about it, it’s the only place we really have control over how our food is handled.
I know not everyone will agree with these findings. I would love to hear some of the opinions and food safety practices others use. Join our facebook group (click the link below)- In The Kitchen with Miss T , let’s discuss food safety!
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