Cooking is a wonderful hobby that anyone can learn how to do well, and safely. Cooking is fun, creative, and allows you to explore your palate and different cuisines. Cooking can also help you save money on food by eating out less and cooking delicious, restaurant-quality meals at home.

With two years of COVID19 behind us, many took to the kitchens with a new interest. Some of you, like myself, even got on Tiktok and started to follow food content creators or “gasp” become one. I know I joined minds with a TikTok channel called FoodTokTV and took to the kitchen to share our recipes, created a new website www.FoodTokTV.com, going Live on TikTok every Sunday night, and now host our own Cooking Club every Wednesday night.

But the most important thing about cooking is safety since there are a lot of things that can cause injury or harm in the kitchen. Here are a few tips to practice principles of food safety in the kitchen to prevent food-borne illness and keep everyone safe.

Wash Everything After Use

The first thing that you should do to practice food safety in your kitchen is to wash everything after each use. Once you have used a cutting board for meat or a bowl to scramble eggs, you must wash it to clean it and keep it germ-free. Otherwise, you are allowing food to cross-contaminate, which can lead to the growth of bacteria and germs that are unsafe for consumption. Wash everything with warm water and soap for thirty seconds and rinse it completely before allowing it to dry or towel drying and putting away.

Make Sure Your Meat Cooks Properly

The next crucial food safety principle you need to practice in the kitchen is making sure your meats are cooked properly. Raw or undercooked fish and meat can potentially cause food-borne illness, as the bacteria in the meat hasn’t reached a high enough temperature to be killed off completely. Sous vide cooking makes it much easier to get a precise temperature. A sous vide heats water to a particular temperature and keeps it circulating to keep the temperature constant. That way you can know exactly at what temperature your meat was cooked and for how long.

Use Proper Thawing Technique

The final crucial principle of food safety to practice in your kitchen is the use of proper thawing techniques. If you freeze your meat or fish, then you need to know how to thaw it safely, without letting it develop bacteria that can cause illness. You can thaw your meat and fish slowly in the fridge over the course of several hours or days. You can also place your frozen meat or fish in a bowl of cool water for a time for a speedier, safe thaw.

Food safety is the most important thing to remember when cooking. Without the proper steps in place, you could risk food-borne illness. Make sure that you are practicing these three principles of food safety in your kitchen every day.

Check out this article on the signs you need to make changes in your diet!