There are so many aspects of cooking that I find to be enriching, playful, and a fantastic outlet for creativity! But like a pendulum that swings from one extreme to the other, there is that whole other side that I find tedious, and labor some.
So before you test out that theory you are a natural born chef, you will first need to master some fundamentals. Safety and sanitation. I know that we all think we know what this means. After all, look at you, you’re still alive, and you never thought twice about the academics of safety and sanitation. But lets shift the focus on the nourishment of others for a sec. When you are feeding others it is not always apparent what their immunity level is. And while a compromising food item might sit perfectly well with you, that same little snack could mean a dirt nap for your dear aunt Betsy. So instead of requiring medical records from proposed dinner guests, lets just adopt some pretty standard safety and sanitation principles.
How does food become contaminated? There are three different types of contaminants that affect our food. First is Physical, as in ,”Waiter there is a shard of glass in my soufflé”. Second is chemical, as in, “While my soup is cooking I thought I would spray bleach all around to clean up and give everyone diarrhea from my bleach stew”. And the third is biological and deserves some more detailed attention:
Good Hygiene - Don’t be nasty. Constantly washing your hands is just a part of cooking. Get used to it. You need to wash your hands when you enter the kitchen, after you have handled one food item and are moving onto another, when you use the bathroom, when you sneeze … cough … touch your hair … eat a piece of food … and on and on. Lets just all agree to keep it clean.
Clean Food Surface Areas - I always start off by cleaning my workspace wether in a professional kitchen or my home. You don’t always know what has transpired in a space while you were away and any lurking bacteria is invisible to the naked eye. Save yourself the worry and clean it first.
Cross Contamination - Each food item comes to us with its own baggage, and knowing how to handle each item is half the battle. But to keep it simple, keep things separate. If you have raw chicken juice leaking on over to some lettuce you’re chopping for a salad, you are going to have a problem my friend. One useful discipline is to take care of all of your vegetable chopping first, storing it separately, then moving on to any meat prep. Working from the safest foods to the most potentially harmful, eliminates the opportunity for you to compromise the safety of ready to eat food with those more prone to food related illnesses.
Temperatures - You want to keep cold foods cold and hot foods hot, easy right? Nope. You need to monitor the time/temperate your cold food spends from fridge to table. And if you are cooking that food item then you need to worry about the amount of time that food item takes to heat to a safe cooking temperature. That time in-between, that lukewarm temp, is when bacteria can rapidly reproduce and make your food deadly. And THEN you have to worry about it again when you are cooling food down to put into the fridge. You cant just leave it out and let any surviving bacteria reproduce all over your delicious leftovers! Just try to keep cold foods at a temperature under 40 degrees and hot food over 140 degrees.
Now there are a lot of rules around each food item but I usually teach this in a 6 hour class, so we are not going to get into that here. Here is for awareness and mindfulness. Just don’t be lazy, don’t be nasty, and treat your guests food with the level of respect it deserves (even if you don’t particularly respect the recipient).
Happy eating, and don’t kill any of your guests! Bon Appetite!