Safe Food Handling Could Save Your Business
Posted by Malcolm J. Richmond
Whatever restaurant in Melbourne you happen to be the 4 Mile Restaurant & Pub, Chez Michael, or the Heron Rock Bistro, food safety is important. Even if you have the most successful restaurant in all of Melbourne, all it takes is one food handling mistake to seriously damage your business.
The restaurant business is built on two things - repeat clientele and a good public image of your establishment. Your reputation IS your business. Even one lawsuit stemming from improper food handling can be a catastrophe for your restaurant.
Not only do you need to take certain basic steps and make sure all of your kitchen employees always do in order to prevent directly harming customers with something like food poisoning, you also have to do things right for the sanitation inspectors who may decide to drop in on you and see how you really run things. Even an employee who sees food handling mistakes in the kitchen may squeal on you, especially if they ever lose their job.
And there is more to this than simply properly storing food and disposing of waste.
Food preparation areas must be kept clean at all times. While this sounds easy enough, it is very easy to do this wrong. You must use different cutting boards for meat, seafood and vegetables, for instance. Some restaurants use stainless steel surfaces for food preparation - this can dull knives and according to some, impart a hint of metallic flavor to meats. This is harmless, but hardly good for your reputation. Plastic cutting boards are better as they are easy to clean and inherently more sanitary than are wooden cutting boards. After use, each cutting board must be washed thoroughly. For deep cleaning, chlorine bleach can be employed, but make sure to rinse well if bleach is used in cleaning these surfaces.
Utensils also must be washed after each dish they are used to prepare.
Meats have to be cooked at least to certain minimal internal temperatures in order to assure the death of any pathogens that may have crept inside them. Red meats and pork need to be cooked to not less than 69 and poultry and seafood to at least 74. Even if someone demands a rare steak, cook it to that minimum temperature for at least 15 seconds or there is a serious risk of food poisoning. Any meat that you have reason to feel is not very fresh or well-kept needs to be made very well-done.
Preparing raw foods such as sushi requires extreme care. Serving these foods really means that you have to just have a top-notch clean kitchen and preparation staff, period, in addition to making doubly sure your sushi supplier is very sanitary. Disposable gloves and hair coverings or tie-backs must always be worn by people handling sushi and the preparation area should be kept so clean that, as the saying goes, one could eat off the floor. Any sushi that is not at its freshest needs to be thrown out.
It boggles the mind how many kitchen workers do not wash their hands in between preparing meals, even after handling raw meats. Between meal preparation hand washing is a must and washing one’s hands in between preparing different foods (switching from meat to vegetables, for instance) is, to say the least, a good idea.
By enforcing a strict kitchen sanitation and food handling program, you will be protecting the interests of your customers as well as those of your restaurant.
Tags: Food
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