When cooking food in the kitchen, in addition to wanting to make something that tastes great, you also want to make sure that any food you’re serving is going to be safe to eat. One thing that can make food not safe to eat is if there has been any cross contamination. 

Cross contamination happens when something that is unclean or unsafe touches food or other items that you’re going to put directly in your mouth. And while you might be able to have your immune system handle some of this, if there’s a large amount of cross contamination, you can have some very unpleasant health repercussions.

To help keep this from happening in your kitchen, here are three tips for avoiding cross contamination in the kitchen. 

Thoroughly Clean Hands And Surfaces

One of the best ways to keep cross contamination from impacting the food that you make in your kitchen is to thoroughly clean the surfaces that you’re cooking on and cleaning your hands both before and after touching unclean foods or other items. 

Things like raw meat, especially pork and chicken, shouldn’t be put near anything that isn’t going to be cooked well before eating it. So if you place raw meat or anything that you know contains a lot of germs on a surface, be sure you clean that surface thoroughly before anything else touches it. And if you handle this meat or other unclean items, you need to thoroughly wash your hands before you touch anything else. This way, you’re not spreading unsafe germs around.

Always Keep Raw Foods Separate

To help with keeping these raw foods from cross contaminating other foods, you’ll want to find ways that you can safely keep these foods separated from other foods. 

To do this, you’ll want to bag these foods so that they don’t physically touch other foods. Additionally, you’ll also want to make sure that none of their juices leak out and touch other foods or surfaces. Otherwise, you’ll have to either dispose of that food or clean and sanitize those surfaces. 

Properly Rinse Your Produce

Another way that you can have cross contamination take place in your kitchen is through getting dirt and other germs into your produce when you cut into it. If you don’t clean the outside of your produce before using a knife to cut it, the germs from the outside of that produce are getting into the produce and then will get immediately consumed by you. 

To combat this, make sure that you properly rinse your produce with clean water before you cut into it with a knife. This way, you’ll remove the dirt and keep those germs from getting into the flesh of the produce.  

If you want to make sure that you don’t have issues with cross contamination in your kitchen, consider implementing the tips mentioned above the next time you cook. 

Anna Jones
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