The kitchen is the place where we prepare to indulge our taste buds. Of course, we all want our culinary delights not only to taste great, but also to be perfectly edible and not cause any stomach or intestinal problems. In this article, you will learn tips and tricks to ensure that your kitchen not only looks SUUBER, but is SUUBER too.
Use different boards for preparing different foods
Can you imagine eating the salad that has just been cut on the board where the raw steak has also just been cut? Not a pleasant idea, not even for a SUUBERman. This is not only unhygienic, but can also be dangerous, because you never know what nasty bacteria have already accumulated on the meat. Not all bacteria are dangerous by any means, because we humans rely on billions of bacteria that populate us and help to make our lives easier, but there are still dangerous ones that have nothing good in mind for us.
Please note that it is obvious to use a different board for different foods, but don't forget to use different knives. This could help you to prevent possible bacteria from being transferred to other foods and ensure better hygiene in the kitchen.
Washing your hands🙌
Washing your hands is pretty much the simplest trick, but this doesn't just apply to the kitchen but to impeccable cleanliness in general. Especially in times of pandemics and globalisation, this is an easy way to achieve top hygiene standards, but also an extremely effective one. However, washing your hands was not always so popular.
In the middle of the 19th century, there were still strong doubts that hand washing improved hygiene. However, the physician Ignaz Semmelweis recognised that the mortality rate of women after childbirth was lower when hygiene was better. He noticed this because in one hospital the doctors assisting with the births did not have as clean hands as the midwives in another hospital, where the maternal mortality rate was much lower because the doctors in one hospital often came straight from the dissecting room, where corpses were dissected, before the births. Semmelweiss therefore suggested introducing hand washing for hygienic reasons, which had previously been considered an unnecessary waste of time.
Although he was heavily criticised and hand washing was only introduced a few years after his death, a significant reduction in the number of mothers who died of puerperal fever during childbirth was seen.
Today we know that washing your hands can render many bacteria harmless and greatly reduce the transmission and infection of harmful viruses, thus saving lives.
In conclusion, continue to wash your hands, especially if you work with food in the kitchen.
Avoid food poisoning
Food poisoning or food-borne infections often come from meat, fish, salad or cheese. With meat and fish, it is quite easy to prevent them. Salmonella bacteria die if the meat or fish is simply cooked. As a general rule, it helps not to store food in the open, but always in sealed containers. This effectively prevents the transfer of pathogens from one product to another. You can also prevent food-borne infections in meat by roasting it well, as most bacteria only die at a heat of 70-100 degrees Celsius.
Pay attention to the best-before date
Even if the best-before date does not seem particularly logical for some products, for example a bottle of water, it can be helpful to pay attention to the best-before date, because if a product is in your fridge but has been expired and spoiled for a long time, but you do not notice this, it can happen that undesirable creatures such as bacteria, mould or fungi can form, which can also infect other foods.
It can therefore help if you consistently ensure that you always consume food before the expiry date to prevent possible contamination from bacteria and co. What goes in the fridge first should be eaten first.
Storing fruit
If you don't yet have a net or closed fruit basket for the fruit on your table, you might want to reconsider, as fruit flies are not particularly harmful, but they are annoying. Fruit flies prefer rotten fruit as it doesn't have such a hard skin, so it's always worth checking carefully before eating to see if one or two apples have gone bad without you realising it.
You should also always rinse the fruit immediately after buying it, as fruit flies will either find their way to the fruit through an open window, or they will be in eggs on the fruit when you buy it, so it is worth rinsing the fruit briefly to avoid breeding annoying fruit flies.
Clean the refrigerator regularly
We store perishable food in the fridge so that it lasts longer. It is therefore worth making sure that the fridge is clean so as not to shorten the shelf life of food unnecessarily. In this blog article, we have already explained in detail how to get your fridge SUUBER. To summarise, here is a brief overview:
- Store food in containers, do not leave open in the refrigerator
- Ideal: completely empty and clean the fridge once a month
One last tip for the fridge: don't break the cold chain and otherwise utilise the food as quickly as possible. With frozen food, potential bacteria are not active on it. They "sleep" at negative temperatures. However, if the cold chain is interrupted once, twice as many bacteria will form and the product will have a shorter shelf life.
