“How Not to Kill People”
Before dinner last Saturday, I was talking with a couple of friends (you know you’re reading this) and the topic of kitchen safety came up. One of my friends mentioned that he had seen a report that said that the kitchen has gobs and gobs of bacteria and it’s a wonder why people aren’t getting sick all over the place. The three of us kind of laughed it off by saying that we are careful cooks and none of us had ever killed anyone yet (at least not through cooking), and that some level of bacterial exposure is useful for our immune systems. In reality, though, we should mention kitchen hygiene and food safety, so here goes.
We spend plenty of time talking about different foods and complements to those foods, but all of this is for naught if we end up killing our dinner guests. Tuesday’s New York Times (which always includes the coveted Science Times section) had a useful article meant to raise awareness of the effects of poor kitchen hygiene. The recommendations, which are called Fight Bac! and can also be found at the USDA, are as follows:1. CLEAN
Basically, wash your hands, utensils, counters, cookware, cutting boards, etc., when using them, especially between food items like raw meat, poultry, seafood, vegetables, and ready to eat items. Also wash fruits, vegetables, and especially melons and the like before cutting them to avoid contaminating the flesh from the skin.
2. SEPARATE
No, I’m not talking about fleishigs and milchigs. Avoid cross contamination between raw and ready to eat foods. This means not putting cooked food on platters or boards that have been used for raw foods, not using marinades that haven’t been boiled after holding raw foods, etc.
3. COOK
Please cook foods thoroughly. Most people do not use meat thermometers, although we pretty much all should have them. (Alas, I have one for most of the year, but have to wing it on Pesach.) It is important to cook food to the proper temperature.
4. CHILL
After cooking, you should store your leftovers (and not-made-yets) at the right temperature too. In general, it is recommended that your refrigerator be no warmer than 40 F (4 C) and the freezer should be no warmer than 0 F (-18 C). Keep foods either warm enough or cool enough, which means that warm foods should be chilled quickly for storage. Also, you should not defrost meats at room temperature — use the refrigerator or cold water.
I hope you find this helpful and are as successful as I have been at not killing people (at least with food).
(And in case you’re interested with where I got the title of this post: I was talking with a former college roommate of mine the other day about taking classes pass/fail (he’s in law school now and isn’t going to the class he’s taking pass/fail). I mentioned that some med schools (like perhaps this one) have pass/fail classes. His response was “That’s cool. No, wait, no it isn’t. Oh, well, I guess it is, as long as you don’t take ‘how not to kill people’ pass/fail.” Maybe you had to be there.)
Thank you for this vital post. DH and I frequently discuss the importance of not killing our dinner guests. Undercooked cholent seems to be a common problem in Jewish households. Whether a crockpot or conventional oven is used, cholent should be brought to a boil so that the meat cooks through before the temperature is reduced.
Really? We’ve been cooking ours in a "warm" oven (about 200 degrees) and have never had a problem with undercooking. Doesn’t most meat register as "well done" by 160?
212 degrees is boiling, so if your 200 is really 212 (ovens aren’t very precise), you’re fine. DH says that most harmful bacteria "don’t do that well at high temperatures, anyway." But I don’t see any reason to risk it.We have encountered underdone cholent a number of times, but it was probably cooked at a temperature significantly lower than 200 degrees.
To interject some nerdy engineering in here, I’ll say that the surrounding temperature (be it the oven or other cooking device) only needs to be higher than the desired temperature of the food in order for it to cook. However, if it takes too long, you could be setting yourself up for failure. So, since the desired temperature of poultry is ~180 F (not necessarily the stuffing temp), the oven only needs to be higher than that. It is possible to cook things at 200 F, just not so well advised. For example, the turducken was cooked at around 250 F, but for about 10 hours.
J. Steingarten describes cooking a turducken at a ridiculously-hard-to-maintain 195 F.I’d agree with Elf that, for most cooking techniques, such low temperatures are inadvisable. Still, one has to imagine that everything in the oven has reached equilibrium after 18 hours or so. (We use an oven thermometer, since the oven’s thermostat is off by about 50 degrees. The "warm" setting keeps it a hair below 200 F.)
Oh, and a nice little food safety trick: After the end of a dish washing session, soak your sponge and then microwave it at high power until too hot to touch comfortably. This should sterilize the sponge, so that you don’t have to deal with any enlightened bacterial civilizations the following morning.