Holiday Food Safety

With Thanksgiving just around the corner, what better time to do a few suggestions to help make your big meal safer with some holiday food safety tips! We’re going to talk thawing, preparing, cooking, and holding (letting food set out after being cooked). The exact temperatures and procedures may vary a little from state to state (in the USA) or may be wildly different in your country, so if you work in a kitchen always be sure to check with your local health department to get the exact details for your locality. For most people cooking at home, these should be sufficient to reduce your chances at having a food borne illness. And you’re always welcome to err on an even safer side than what we present here, we’re just looking to make you think about it and give you at least a little foundation on which to build!

Did You Thaw That?

Anyone else forget to pull that frozen meat out of the freezer until it’s time to try cooking it? Yeah, not a fun experience. We certainly forget more than I’d like to admit. Don’t fear, though, you do have a few options available to you. If you need to thaw it quickly, you can place the meat in a water-tight bag (think ZipLock, or maybe it’s already packaged in one?) and place it in a bowl. Stick that bowl in your sink and use COLD water to fill the bowl. Once it’s full, leave a little stream of water running. We want to keep that water slightly agitated so that it’s able to take some of the frozen out of what we’re trying to cook. Unless you’re thawing something giant, this should have it thawed in about half an hour.

“Why not use warm water?”, I hear you ask. We can’t recommend warm or hot water for a very good reason, we want to keep our food cold until it’s time to cook it. There’s naturally a little bit of bacteria on our food, and I know that sounds gross, but it’s normally destroyed in the cooking process. But if we bring the temperature of the food up to warm, talking anywhere over 41°F but also under 140°F, that bacteria can multiply quickly. The longer you keep it in that “Danger Zone”, the more you risk not destroying all that bacteria by cooking the food.

“What about my microwave?” Well, there’s a few reasons I wouldn’t use a microwave, although sometimes it can be an option (I still prefer to just wait for the water to do the trick). Microwaves often cook rather unevenly, so you could end up with spots that are cooking (temperatures above 140°F) while other spots are still frozen! Microwaves only go about 2” into the food, so as long as you’re not trying to thaw anything really big in your microwave you should be okay if you insist on using it or just can’t wait for the water to thaw it. Just be careful, microwaves cook from outside to inside; they can quickly over-cook the surface of the food and drastically alter the flavor of the final product.

Best practice is to just move the items you plan to cook to the fridge to thaw a few hours to a day ahead of the time you actually cook it. If you can plan for the meal, being a day ahead should be sufficient for most everyone. Now I know there’s less than a week before everyone is going to be cooking their turkeys, but something the size of a turkey is going to need a little more time. We’re talking five to six hours per pound, so that’d put a 10lb turkey at upwards of 60 hours or 2½ days! Hopefully you’ve got time to thaw your 20+ pound big birds!

All the Prep!

Just a few basic reminders here, but they’re important! It’s important to avoid “cross-contamination” which is basically just a fancy way to say “getting raw chicken juice on your fully cooked steak”. It’s easy to avoid, it just requires a little planning. Best to think of it like a one way street. It’s okay to start at the one end, but if you ever need to go backwards you have to go all the way around the block and start over from the beginning. And by beginning, I mean starting with a clean cutting board or other work surface, a clean knife, and a clean set of hands (and maybe gloves, if you’re really trying to be neat). Unless there’s an allergy, it usually goes

Vegetables → Dairy → Fish/Shellfish → Beef/Pork → Wild Game → Poultry

Safest → Least Safe

If you’re going to be cutting vegetables, it’s always a good idea to start there. And for the vegetables, if there’s a drier vegetable (think cabbage or peppers) it’s generally better to cut them and finish up with a wetter vegetable (think tomato or cucumber). If you need to go back and cut some vegetables after you stuffed your turkey, you should wash everything that could potentially have some turkey juices on it before starting over. And if you’re going to store it all in your fridge, try to store it in a similar fashion. Don’t stick your raw turkey on the top shelf, it should go as low down as possible. We wouldn’t want all those juices to contaminate everything below it, or even risk that!

How do I Cook it?

There’s a lot of methods of cooking, we’ll get into those at some point! But for food safety when cooking, there’s two basic rules, temperature and time! Basically, if its not something you’d give to your kids uncooked, there’s a minimum temperature that it should reach before it’s considered safe. An instant read thermometer is a fantastic kitchen tool to make sure you reach safe temperatures. They’re about the same price as a box of cereal (maybe two boxes for the fancier, nicer ones), and can help keep your family safe from food sicknesses. Most of the ones I’ve seen have come with a chart that tells you the temperature a certain type of meat should be to be safe, but for simplicity I’ll add one here.

	Rare	Medium Rare	Medium	Medium Well	Well
Beef	140°F	145°F	150°F	155°F	160°F
Pork	X	145°F	150°F	155°F	160°F
Fish	X	X	X	X	145°F
Poultry	X	X	X	X	165°F

There’s a few exceptions, like it’s recommended to cook wild game to 165°F. There’s also a few exceptions when it comes to doing huge roasts of beef and pork, but those mostly involve holding it at a certain temperature below 140°F for a prolonged period of time (like smoking or sous vide). Once you get your food starting to cook (coming above that 40°F threshold), you should try to reach the 140°F mark within four hours for maximum safety.

When it comes to big hunks of meat, we’re usually looking at around 12 to 15 minutes per pound in a 325°F oven. If you’re lucky enough to have a convection (forced air circulation in the oven), you will be more on the 10 to 12 minutes per pound at that temperature. Just be careful about turning the heat up, the higher temperatures will pull more moisture out of your roasts.

It’s Done, now what?

If you’ve safely thawed, prepared, and cooked your food, you should probably enjoy some of it. That is if your kids and the rest of the family don’t beat you to it all first. Go ahead, we’ll be here once you get a full belly!

Okay, so once that food cools to below 140°F (maybe half an hour after it was done for most things), you should try to get that food cooled back off and in the fridge within two hours for the best safety. If your children like to pull leftovers out of the fridge and eat them cold, it’s better if you were able to move quickly and get the food put way in that time frame. If you can get your kids to put it in the microwave until it’s steaming hot, then you’ll have a little more flexibility on getting it all cooled off, but you should aim to have it put up and in the fridge after four hours at the most. Speaking of reheating, you should try to get it to hold at or above 165°F for two minutes. Once it’s been reheated, it shouldn’t be saved again. So if you’re eating leftovers, it’s always better to have to heat more than waste more. Make sure your kids don’t pick their portions with their eyes when reheating to avoid wasting a lot of food.

There’s a lot to digest there. We hope that bit about safety helps make your holidays a little more appetizing and keeps you all safe on the several leftover meals some of you may have afterwards!

Guten Appetit, enjoy your meals!

Stay healthy family!