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A GUIDE TO KITCHEN HYGIENE

Now more than ever, it’s very important to ensure that even in our own homes, we need to maintain a healthy environment. The kitchen is where meals are prepared and it therefore requires greater hygiene and cleanliness. To avoid contaminating food, careful attention must be paid to water, surfaces and tools. Here’s how.

Detergents Alone Do Not Suffice

 

Cleaning kitchen surfaces, shelves and tools is very important as it allows us to prevent the spread of organisms and bacteria that are damaging to man. Household detergents help a great deal, but alone often do not suffice. To keep the environment healthy, it is also important to adopt a series of correct habits we will now explain.

Cleaning: Three Fundamental Rules

 

1) Always wash your hands, each time you handle food and objects: if you touch a dirty tool, your hands automatically become laden with bacteria that can be transferred to food;

 

2) Clean shelves, tools and rubbish bins with sanitizing products that are able to reduce the presence of bacteria;

 

3) Clean the kitchen at least once a day or, if possible, after each meal preparation.

 

Important Precautions

 

1) Change towels and cloths frequently as they provide fertile breeding grounds for bacteria;

 

2) Pay attention to food: what is consumed raw should be kept separate from foods requiring cooking, in order to avoid possible contamination. Equally, use different tools and chopping boards for the cutting of these different products;

 

3) Set the dishwasher cycle to at least 50°C, as this guarantees better hygiene;

 

4) Clean the refrigerator at least once a month and defrost at least twice a year.

Cooking And Freezing

 

1) Cooking temperature is a key factor in hygiene: it is therefore important to be aware that each food requires different types of treatment to eliminate the organisms present.

 

2) Freezing reduces bacterial activity but does not eliminate all bacteria and when food is defrosted, the microbes begin multiplying once again.Try to ensure that food is therefore defrosted only when it is to be cooked immediately, in order to avoid germ proliferation.