 Hi, today we're going to be talking about food safety when preparing food for the public. When you are preparing food for people that you may know or may not know, it is important to practice food safety. One of the things that we want to prevent from happening is a foodborne illness. A foodborne illness is actually a disease that is transmitted to people through food. That means that a person eats a food that is contaminated and they could get sick. They could have diarrhea, vomiting, fever, that could be hospitalized, and some people have died. There are 128,000 hospitalizations and over 3,000 deaths every year associated with foodborne illnesses. So we don't want that number to go up. We want to prevent those numbers from happening. So that is the purpose of this lesson today is to teach you some food safety handling tips when preparing food for the public. Okay, so first, let's look at some ways that people can contaminate food and actually it's things that we do that we don't even know and realize that we do them, but just running your fingers through your hair, wiping or touching your nose, using a cell phone, those are ways that people can, if they touch your hair to face their body and then touch the food, whatever is in their hair, in their nose, whatever is on their phone can actually get on the food and someone could eat what came out of your hair, off of your phone and off of the surfaces that you might have touched. So make sure that you're not touching things and then touching the food. Make sure you wash your hands in between doing those actions. Let's talk a little bit about washing our hands. Our hands can be a vehicle, a transmitting bacteria in all of those germs from to the food. So we want to make sure our hands are clean. So to wash your hands properly, you need to make sure that you're using warm soap and water. We recommend that the water be at least 100 degrees when washing your hands and make sure you're using soap. Just rinsing your hands off and drying them off is not a good practice. So make sure you're using soap and warm water. You want to wash your hands, making bubbles and scrub vigorously for about 20 seconds each time you're washing your hands, about 20 seconds. And when you're doing washing your hands and rinsing all of the soap off, use a single use paper towel to dry your hands. Avoid using a cloth towel. It's so easy for us to pick up that dish towel or an apron and to dry our hands on that, but that can recontaminate our hands. So make sure you're using a single use paper towel to dry your hands and then go a step further. Turn the water off with that paper towel and then discard it. That will keep your hands from becoming more recontaminated. Okay, so now let's talk about our pets in our home. So I know we love our pets. They're so cute and so cuddly, and they're part of the family. But they can also be a source of contamination. So we have to make sure that our pets do not contaminate surfaces that are going to touch the food. So really the rule of thumb is if you're preparing food for the public, not to have pets in the kitchen area when you're doing that. Make sure that your area is clean and don't allow your pets to be in the area for any reason. Sometimes I know people like to allow their pets to sample the food. That would not be a good idea to do that when you're preparing food for the public. So just make sure there are no pets in the prep area where you're preparing the food. Okay, so now let's talk about the safe food handler. So who is the food handler? That's actually the person is going to be preparing the food. There are some food safety guidelines and tips we would like for you to follow when preparing food for the public. First thing is no bare hand contact. You want to make sure that your bare hands are not touching the food. So we recommend that you wear gloves. But before putting on those gloves, you need to make sure that you're washing your hands. Now some will say, well, can we just put hand sanitizer on and then put our gloves on? Well, hand sanitizer is a sanitizer, it is not a cleaner. Soap and water cleans your hands. Sanitizer reduces the number of bacteria on your hands to a safe level. If your hands are fairly dirty, then guess what, it's not going to work. So you want to make sure that you're washing your hands and then putting on gloves before touching food. Never touch your food, food that you're preparing for the public with your bare hands. Always use some type of barrier. Now do you have to wear gloves? No, you can use utensils, you can use atons, you can use daily sheets. Just make sure that your bare hands are not touching the food. Okay, so what about the next thing that a safe food handler should have in mind? Well, one of the things is that you should wear a hair restraint. What is a hair restraint? It is actually a physical covering over your hair. It keeps the hair out of the food. How many times have you possibly gone to a restaurant and you looked down and there was a hair in your food, it grosses you out? And guess what, when you're preparing food for the public, the same thing could possibly happen if you don't have your hair covered when you're preparing the food. So make sure your hair is covered with a, you can put a little satin cap or a hat or a hair net. I know we don't usually have hair nets around the house, but just something to tie your hair up, a scarf, anything just to protect your hair from the food. All right, so no eating, drinking, smoking, chewing gum, or chewing tobacco when preparing food. Well, why not? Why can't I taste a little bit when I'm cooking my food or trying to sample to see how good it tastes? Well, the risk in that is that when you pick up food with your hands and you put it in your mouth, there's a possibility that salava droplets can get onto your fingers. And if they do and you go back and touch the food, then you're transferring that salava from your mouth to the food and someone could be eating your salava. So that's why we don't recommend eating or drinking or smoking or chewing gum or tobacco while preparing food. It's just not a safe practice for the public. So how do you taste food? Well, we recommend that if you are sampling, you want to just take a fork or a spoon, get a little bit of the food, step away from it, taste it, see if it's to your liking. And if that spoon put it in the sink, if you need to go back and get another, get another clean spoon before you go back in, because if you're sampling and then you put that spoon back into the pot, again, you're transferring that salava back to the pot and someone could be eating that. And that's not safe. So we want to make sure that we're preparing food in the right, safest way for the public. Okay, I know we have covered a lot of ground so far and some food safety tips when preparing food for the public. But the next thing I want to cover that's really important is cleaning and sanitizing. Make sure that your area where you are preparing the food is actually clean and sanitized. You want to wash your, your cabinets with hot soapy water. You want to make sure that your floors are swept and your dishes actually need to be run through the dishwasher. If you have it, if you don't have a dishwasher, just wash them in hot soapy water in your sink and then rinse and sanitize. So how do you sanitize your dishes? I know growing up, we just washed them and put them and rinse them and put them in the dish rack. But you actually, the safest way to do it when you're preparing food for the public is to do that next step. So we recommend one teaspoon of bleach per one gallon of water. That is all that you need to use as a sanitizer. So just one teaspoon per gallon and you just dip that into, dip your, your, your pots and pans, plates, your utensils, whatever that, whatever type of dishware that will be touching the food. That's a food contact surface. You want to make sure that it is clean and sanitized. And I know some people will think, well, I could just use Lysol or Clorox wipes or disinfectant wipes. Well, that's good for surfaces that won't touch food. But if you're, if you are cleaning and sanitizing a surface that will touch food, you want to make sure that you are just using soapy water and that one teaspoon per gallon. But disinfectant wipes actually have chemicals on it. And if you read the, the ingredient label and the directions, it will tell you, do not allow this wipe to come in contact with a food contact surface, any surface that will touch food. So it's not a smart idea to take that wipe and wipe a knife off or to wipe off a cutting board or to wipe down a countertop where you're going to be putting food directly on it. Just make sure you're using those in a way that's going to be safe for your food and for others that will be eating your food. Okay. I know I've thrown a lot at you. I know I have, but hopefully it's sticking because we want to prepare the food as safely as possible for the public. So the next thing we're going to be doing to the food is cooking it. So how do we keep our food safe when we're cooking it? We want to make sure that we are cooking our foods to the correct internal cook temperature. And that will vary depending on the food that you're cooking. So if you're cooking, for example, casseroles, you want to make sure those casseroles are cooked to 165 degrees internally. How do you know it's 165 degrees? Well, you got to use a thermometer. Guess you said thermometer. Yes. Casseroles should have a thermometer to measure the temperature of their food. So you want to use that thermometer to take the temperature and make sure that it's done. A lot of people just go by timing how long it's in there or following a recipe to say cook it for 30 minutes. But recipes can vary. You may have a recipe. You may make it a little thicker or thinner and could be any of those factors in there that could cause the cooking time and the temperature to be a little bit off. So the surefire way to make sure it's done is to use a thermometer. Another process in cooking your food is actually before you even cook it, it may be frozen and you may need to thaw it. So you want to make sure that you are thawing your food correctly. You do not want to thaw your food on the counter. I know I can remember times before I learned food safety that I would leave it out on the counter to thaw. Hey, room temp. It'll thaw it out a little quicker, right? Not a good practice, not safe. The reason why is because bacteria can actually grow from the outside of that food to the inside of that food and some bacteria can grow to be heat resistant, which means you cannot cook and kill it. And if that is the case then someone could eat that food even though you went and took it through the cooking process and still could get sick from that. So how do you safely thaw food? You can safely thaw food in your refrigerator, but you have to plan ahead. So if you have something like a big roast or ham or something that is thick like a turkey, you want to allow at least one full day, 24 hours for every five pounds of meat that you're trying to thaw out. That's the rule of thumb. I would not sit it out at room temperature because that's just not a safe practice to do it. Some people say, well, can I just put it in the sink in water? That's not a safe practice. Again, you may still have that factor of bacteria growing. Now if you wanted to thaw it under running water, the water needs to be continuously running the whole time on that meat. So something really thick is probably not going to work. It'll take too long and it'll run your water bill up. So the best way to do it when you're planning for the public or cooking for the public is to plan ahead. Take that food out in enough time for it to thaw out in the refrigerator on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator because guess what? We want to prevent cross-contamination. What is that? That's when our bacteria is transferred from one food to the other. We don't want those drippings to drip down on our other food in the refrigerator. So we want to make sure if it's on the bottom, we prevent that from happening. Also when you're thawing, put it into a pan before you put it in the refrigerator. That will keep it from dripping all over the refrigerator as well. But still that bottom shelf is going to be the safest place to thaw your food. Alright so the last thing that we're going to cover is cooling. Now cooling is super important because you've gone through the trouble to make sure that you're safe and your kitchen is clean and sanitized and you don't have any pets in the home and you've washed your hands, you've cooked it to the right temperature and now you want to cool it down, we don't want to make a mistake here. Alright so if you're preparing something that's hot and you need to cool it down, there's actually ways to do that safely. And one of the ways that you can do it is by taking the pan. Let's use, I'm just stuck on casseroles today. So let's use a casserole for an example. Let's say that you baked your casserole in a dish, okay? You want to make an ice water bath. That means that you're going to take some ice water and make sure the container of ice water is actually big enough that you can sit that container with that casserole in it into the water. What is that going to do? That's actually going to cool down that casserole from the outside to the inside. How are you going to know it's cooling? You've got to use that thermometer. You want to try to get that casserole cooled down. Our rule of thumb is that you go from 135 degrees down to 70 degrees and do that within two hours. Then you want to go from 70 degrees down to 41 degrees and you have four hours. So y'all, you have six hours to get it cooled down safely. Now what you don't want to do is leave it out on the counter, okay? Leaving it out on the counter, it took cool down. That's not good because you're going to get bacterial growth to start growing on it and then when it cools down it's not going to kill it. The bacteria goes into like hibernation and it's going to come back out and come alive when it's time to warm that casserole up. So just make sure that you're using an ice water bath. Now what I do sometimes, I'll take a sanitized, clean plastic bag, fill it with ice and place it on top of that dish. You can even put some foil or saran wrap on top just to protect it if you want to have peace of mind about it. Then lay that bag of ice on top. It will cool down quickly, okay? So the best thing to do is just to be intentional about paying attention to those little details of handling that food, doing that, you will make sure that you are preparing that food safe for the public. All right, so we're done. I've given you some food safety tips that you can use when preparing food for the public. I hope that you've learned a lot. I hope that you will apply some of the things or all of the things that you've learned today. If you have questions about food safety, we have a website. It is www.aces.edu. Just search for the food safety and quality page and we have a lot of information on food safety and a lot of people that are covering the whole state that can help you answer questions about food safety. So go to and find a food safety and quality agents in with the extension system and we're there to help you. Thank you.