By Rick Markley
It doesn’t matter how good the food tastes. If it has you doubled over the toilet with flu-like symptoms, it wasn’t worth eating. Just as your turnout gear will harbor nasty little organism if not properly cleaned, so too will you kitchen surfaces and food. In the third of our four-part series on fire station cooking, Chef Tom Beckman examines the cause and remedies of food-borne illnesses.
Explain cross contamination.
Cross contamination is one of the biggest problems that people don’t know about. It is the transfer of pathogens, that is disease-causing organisms, from one food surface or a person to another food. Cross contamination can occur if I touch one food that is raw and touch another food that has been cooked, or a ready-to-eat food like salad greens, deli meats or cut fruit.
About Chef Tom Beckman
Chef Tom Beckman has been a culinary educator for the last 15 years at Le Cordon Bleu Chicago. He mainly teaches baking and pastry but has been known to grill, braise and sauté. He began his career in the early 1990s at a series of Chicago hotels, most notably the Ritz-Carlton Chicago. He has been pastry cook, pastry chef, private chef and consultant to food and equipment manufacturers over the last 20 years. He loves working with students of all ages and is either in a kitchen or on the street riding his bike. Chef Tom has been doing a podcast for 6 years where he covers a wide variety of topics of food. |
The most common place for this is cutting boards. A lot of people just don’t think cutting boards are that big of a deal; they wrongly believe that you can just wipe them off and work on the next thing.
Cross contamination is easy to prevent. Use multiple cutting boards; you can wash one while you are using another. Be aware and wash your hands constantly between tasks. People will say, “Eh, I’ll wash my hands when I’m done.” Not the best idea; you want to wash your hands as often as possible.
Sometimes people will put something on the grill using tongs. And when the chicken needs to be turned, they don’t wash the tongs and go back, they just turn the chicken. Now you have cross contamination from the same food; it was raw once, now it is ready to eat. It could theoretically be taken care of if you bring that food back to 165 degrees for 15 seconds. But, it is not a good idea.
Another thing people will do is have platters with the raw meat or maybe a marinade. They will put it on the grill and then right back in the marinade. They will say, “Oh, look at all the extra flavor.” No, it’s got extra pathogens. Always use a clean platter for the cooked food.
What cleaning products are most effective?
Regular soap and water is your best. You can sanitize with vinegar if you have nothing else around. It is not that important as long as you have hot water, a cutting board can be used over and over; same thing with utensils, too.
So it is not worth the extra money for ‘super cleaners?’
No. What’s so funny is soap does that (kills 99.9% of germs) too. They always put on the container that it is antibacterial. Well, soap is antibacterial. They put that on labels because people are now more aware of it.
How hot must the water be to get dishes and tools clean?
As hot as you can stand. I know that is not a very exact answer. They say in sanitation, 100 degrees. But 100 degrees is not that hot; 110 or 120 is probably sufficient. For a food service operation, a dish machine has to go up to 180 degrees. But for the average kitchen, good hot water is good. You can also think about, in addition to soap and water, chemical sanitizers. We use Ecolab, so we both heat sanitize and chemical sanitize. You can do just one or the other, too. Doing both is a good precaution; if one breaks down you always have the other. Consumer-style dishwashers will get up to 180 degrees easily.
Any rules for keeping leftovers safe?
If you make six gallons of chili, not everybody eats it and you’ve got two gallons left over. It might still be hot when you finish dinner. At this point you have to separate it into smaller containers or get it cooled down to below 70 degrees within two hours, and then below 41 degrees in another four hours. The idea is that you are going to cool it down so the pathogens don’t grow in that space and time.
Once you have it cooled down, you can put it in the refrigerator and it is safe for seven days. Now (by day seven), you might see some quality loss in terms of taste, but safety-wise, for seven days, you are fine.
When you want to reheat it, take the chili out of the fridge and put it in a pot to reheat. You have two hours to reheat it to 165 degrees. Anytime you reheat it has to be to 165, no matter what kind of food it is. Even if it is steak, it has to be brought to 165.
You should have a thermometer. But (if you don’t) you’ve got two hours, so bring it up slowly until it bubbles, then you are already at 212 degrees.
How should you store leftovers?
I would say airtight. I like to use plastic containers or stainless steel, then I wrap it tightly in plastic cling wrap. That’s up to the person who’s doing it. I use a lot of those containers that deli meat comes in. They are clear, so you can see through them; they are airtight; and they are really durable.
What are the dos and don’ts for washing fruits and vegetables?
I would say that people wash a little too aggressively. Take berries, for instance, just rinse them. And be sure to dry them on a towel before you use them because the water will deteriorate the fruit like crazy, really fast.
There was a study I read about in the New York Times. Harold McGee, who wrote “On Food and Cooking,” did a little experiment where he put strawberries in 140-degree water for 30 seconds. He took them out and dried them. They lasted longer in the refrigerator. What happens is people buy strawberries and they go bad in a day or two. He says this bit of heat treating makes a big difference and can extend the shelf life of your fruit. That being said, a quick rinse of most fruits is going to help you, no matter what it is: peaches, plums. You don’t have to scrub it.
Vegetables that have been in the ground — like potatoes, carrots, celery — you definitely want to scrub. I like leeks and there are places that catch dirt and you have to rinse those off really well. You definitely want to scrub a potato before you put it in the oven. Use just water; I wouldn’t put any soap on it.
When there was the e-coli in the spinach, the e-coli was not on the outside of the spinach, it was on the inside. You cannot wash it off. That is why they had to recall that. It is pretty scary, because there is no way around that — you eat it, you get sick.
How sick can you get from poor kitchen sanitation?
It depends on the pathogen. If you have salmonella you can have anything from a little gastro-intestinal problems, to nausea, to vomiting, to paralysis, to even death. People have died from these things. It runs the gamut quite a bit.
Salmonella is common in this country. So is e-coli, mainly from beef, but it can come from spinach. Also, big fish like tuna, shark, swordfish, can carry some diseases if you do not buy from reputable suppliers — that’s the Illinois sanitation code talking. If you buy from reputable suppliers, you will get good fish — theoretically. The bottom line is, know who your supplier is. If you are buying fish out of the back of some guy’s car trunk, it is probably not the best way to buy it. Local grocery is fine. I get a lot of fish from Dominick’s.
Where people get sick is when they don’t know and don’t care. A lot of times we don’t know and we just kind of blow it off. Don’t blow off sanitation, think safety.
How do you care for your rags and cleaning sponges?
The number-one thing is replace often. Too many people are too proud. You’ll hear, “look, I’ve had the same sponge for two years.” They don’t cost that much. Replace them often. When they get slightly soiled, get rid of them.
I’m not a big paper towel fan. I would rather use a cloth towel; they are very versatile and durable. You throw them in the wash when you are done. Yes, you are doing the wash more often. Replace them if they get soiled beyond cleaning. Don’t buy expensive ones; they should last at least a couple of months.
Are there hidden areas in a kitchen for pathogens?
No. What’s weird is that they are right in front of us. They are on our work surfaces and our cutting boards. Also, if you have dirty hands and open the oven, you contaminate the handle. The sink is obviously a place to keep good and clean. Your eating surface — plates and silverware — are potential problems.
It is not the hidden places. Yes, you will have the potential for dirt behind your stove. That you have to keep clean to keep rodents and insects out. The ones that affect us most everyday are right in front of us.
And if you do get pests?
It is best not to handle the chemical and traps. Leave that to the pest-control operator. In addition, we have to deny the pests food and access to the building. If you can do those two things, your pest-control operator has a much easier job and it is cheaper.
Seal up any cracks. Rats and mice can get in very small spaces. Make sure drains are covered. If you leave food out constantly, guess what, you are going to have pests.
Fruit flies are more of an annoyance than a real health hazard. The flies that we usually bat away are carrying a lot of diseases because they like to land on feces and transfer that to us. And that can cause some serious problems.
What about the microwave?
Keep it clean of course. But that’s pretty easy to do because there are a lot of flat surfaces. Today’s microwave buttons are easy to keep clean because they are a touch pad.
By removing a couple of screws, you can take off the vent on the microwave and put it in the dishwasher; that’s an area that gets kind of dirty.
But cooking in a microwave, I would steer clean away from cooking in a microwave. To reheat, they are terrific. I usually reheat using the defrost cycle.
