Your Restaurant and Savory, Safe Food
When it comes to your restaurant’s food safety, your own senses can deceive you. The “sniff test” doesn’t cut it to determine whether or not your restaurant’s food is past its prime. Even checking the color of cooked meat isn’t enough to assure the proper temperature has been reached to kill possibly harmful bacteria. Don’t leave the safety of your food to chance; protect your investment and your restaurant’s customers with a few simple measures that take your food safely from refrigeration to your restaurant’s dining room.
First, eliminate the need for a “sniff test.” Use a food rotation system in your restaurant that includes labels indicating the food’s “use-by” date. If the food is in its original packaging, check the expiration date before using it and use foods in the order of expiration to reduce wasted product. Also, don’t combine the remainders of old product with new; doing so risks contaminating an entire batch of food and that contamination could potentially be passed on to your restaurant’s customers.
Proper food rotation should keep your products fresh, but it takes more than that to prepare a safe meal. Cooking times and temperatures are also important. Though it is tempting to “eyeball” the doneness of a food, the USDA has found that one in four burgers that look thoroughly cooked may not really have reached the safe minimum temperature to kill E. coli (160 degrees in ground meats). The only way to be absolutely certain that your restaurant’s meat is free of such bacteria is to use a thermometer when cooking. According to the CDC, foodborne illness (from restaurants and other sources) accounts for 5000 deaths and 76 million cases of illness each year. And the reality is that most people don’t even report it when they get sick. Preventing these cases and protecting your restaurant’s reputation is worth the extra effort of using a cooking thermometer.
Once your fresh food is prepared to the right temperature, your restaurant may need to store it for a while. A term that is important to know here is TCS: Time and Temperature Control for Safety. Foods that are put into this category by the FDA include those with a water activity level of greater than .85 and an acidity level between 4.6 and 7.5. These foods are at high risk for bacterial growth if they are not kept at the proper temperatures for the approved amount of time.
Ensuring that your restaurant keeps up with the latest in food safety measures can be a daunting task, but the USDA’s simplified food safety to-do list is as follows:
- Clean (hands, kitchen equipment, restaurant supplies).
- Separate (raw meats from other foods).
- Cook (using a thermometer).
- Chill (leftovers at 40 degrees or below).
Serv-U has an extensive online Food Safety Resource Center to help you find all the information your restaurant needs to keep up-to-date. And all the restaurant supplies you will need to protect your food can be found right here at Serv-U!
