Cooking For a Crowd

Lesson 4: Beverages, Help & Food Safety

Food Safety

The following is a list of commonsense food safety practices. Especially if your party includes people in a High Risk Group - defined as the elderly, infants and toddlers, and anyone with chronic disease affecting the immune system – please read up thoroughly on food safety. The government site listed in the bibliography is an excellent resource.

• In food safety, there are two important numbers - 40 degrees and 140 degrees. Between these two limits is the danger temperature zone at which bacteria multiply really happily. Remember “life begins at 40”.

  When perishable food is out of the refrigerator or off heat, remember this temperature zone. You don’t want the food to stay in the zone longer than 2 hours, conservatively, or for 3 hours at a maximum.

• If you’re serving hot food on a buffet, keep it warm in a chafing dish or on a hot plate, and check to make sure the temperature is being held over 140 degrees. For cold foods, either serve cold them in batches, keeping each batch cold until needed, or keep the food over ice. Check with a thermometer.

  Also, it is good practice to check your refrigerator and freezer temperature. The refrigerator should be at 40 degrees or below. To keep food properly frozen and in optimal condition, the freezer should be 0 degrees or lower.

• You also need to cook food thoroughly. While there are a lot of bugs out there, a few foods cause the most problems in the home kitchen – poultry and eggs, ground beef, pork, and fish. It’s good to remember the temperatures these foods need to reach to disarm any bugs.

  Cook poultry to 165 degrees in its thickest part, any ground beef dish to 155 degrees, pork to 150 degrees, and fish to 140 degrees. Eggs should be cooked until the yolk starts to firm. Please test with thermometers.

• Besides temperature, you need to concern yourself with cleanliness and cross-contamination any time you handle food. First, foremost, and always, the single best thing to do to keep food safe is to wash your hands in the hottest water you can stand. If you like - especially when cutting raw meat and poultry, garlic, and hot peppers - use latex gloves. They’re easily found in the drugstore; the ones with talcum powder come off easily.

• Cutting boards are a common source for cross-contamination. My advice is to buy two, making at least one a plastic board that can fit in your dishwasher for sanitizing. Wooden boards should not go in the dishwasher. Using a laundry marker, or other permanent ink pen, mark one board for meat and poultry, and use the other for vegetables, fruit, etc. Or, if you like a wooden board, use it for any food that can be served raw, and use a plastic board for your meat, poultry, and fish.

• Be aware that cross-contamination also occurs with knives and other utensils, kitchen counters, towels, or your bare hands, so these need to be washed between uses.
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