Food Safety Reminders for the Holiday Season

In this episode, we’re diving into food safety—why it matters and the simple steps to remember when cooking for holiday gatherings.

Resources: 

NC Cooperative Extension Food Safety Website: https://foodsafety.ces.ncsu.edu/

Basic Holiday Food Safety: https://foodsafety.ces.ncsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/basic_holiday_2021-1.pdf-1.pdf?fwd=no

Turkey Thawing: 

 Refrigerator Thawing General Guidelines: 

Pounds | Time
For 4-12 lb turkey | Thaw 1-3 days
12-16 lb turkey | Thaw 3-4 days
16-20 lbs turkey | Thaw 4-5 days
20-24 lb turkey | Thaw 5-6 days

Water Bath Thawing. 

Make sure the water does not get above 40 degrees F and change the water every 30 minutes

Pounds | Time
For 4-12 lb turkey | Thaw 2-6 hours
12-16 lb turkey | Thaw 6-8 hours
16-20 lbs turkey | Thaw 8-10 hours
20-24 lb turkey | Thaw 10-12 hours

Transcript

Lindsey Edwards 0:02

Welcome back to the Extension Connection Podcast, where we connect our listeners to research-based resources to help them build better lives. Hey everyone. This is Lindsay Edwards, your family and consumer science agent in Polk County, and as we come into the season of the holidays, we're potlucks and get togethers involving food or in full effect. I would like to lightly cover the topic known as food safety. Food safety in definition is the action of preparing, handling, or storing food that helps prevent the three types of contaminants, physical, biological, and chemical. Trying to prevent others from getting sick from your food is something that I think we should all be talking about and worried about is. Especially when we're preparing food for our high risk populations of people, which would be young children, the elderly and the immunocompromised. What I wanna do today is just go over some of the guidelines that all people should follow when dealing with any type of food, whether it's for yourself or for others. Let me go over some very general topics related to food safety. Food can become unsafe in quite a few different ways from the way the person prepares it and, the way they handle it to the way the food is stored, to the way it's cooked. So good rule of thumb is to look at the four key steps to keep food safe. And these four key steps that we're gonna go over say are clean. Cook, chill and separate. We'll run through these four topics, so hopefully you will be as prepared as you can be for your next get together, or again, just cooking for your family at home. So let's go over the first one, which is clean. Let's talk about our hands first. Your hands are a vehicle for all kinds of bacteria and pathogens that could potentially be on there. So proper hand washing is extremely important before you're working with any type of food or in the kitchen, it's important that we are washing our hands. Now the proper way to wash your hands is to turn on warm running water, which by the way, the reason we use warm water instead of cold water is because warm water can get off more grease than cold water cam. We're gonna wet our hands and we're gonna lather up with soap. The scrubbing process should take between 10 to 15 seconds, making sure that you're getting the backs of your hands underneath your fingernails, up to your wrists. And then you're gonna rinse under that warm water that is still turned on from the beginning. After that, you're gonna use a single use paper towel to dry your hands and then turn the water off. Use the single use paper towel to turn the water off to. Don't use your clean hands that you just wash to turn it off. Hand sanitizer is not the same as washing your hands. It does not take the place of hand washing. If you wanna use hand sanitizer at this point, you can, but it is not necessary. The other thing that is not necessary is antibacterial soap. Just plain soap and water is effective, and making sure that you're really creating a lather and getting that agitation is very important. Next thing you need to worry about with cleanliness is your utensils, bowls, pans, and any equipment being used such as like a work surface, a countertop, anything like that, that you were cleaning and sanitizing. So cleaning is when you're washing with soap and water to remove any debris dried on crusties. Anything that would be on there. Sanitizing is when you're using a sanitizer solution or heat to kill any viruses or bacteria that are not visible to the naked eye. So you wanna make sure that for a bowl that had raw eggs in it, for example, that you're washing it really good and then you are doing some sort of sanitizer was whether that's putting that in your dishwasher or using a sanitizer solution to sanitize it. You also wanna make sure you're washing any fruits or vegetables being used under running water, and taking really special care with things like melons, because melons can be a dangerous food. They grow on the ground, they're close to dirt. We take them, we don't necessarily wash the outside like we should. We cut through them, we bring that dirt to the middle and that can expose it to that bacteria. So like using a scrub brush and scrubbing the skin, especially like a cantaloupe where it has those grooves in it, is very important. One thing you don't wanna wash is your meat. The USDA or the US Department of Agriculture did a study that showed that washing your meat or poultry can actually spread more bacteria than it can help. What they say is that if you're going to cook it, so if I'm going to cook chicken. You're going to kill any of those harmful bacteria that might be off it, that you think you're washing off, and that it actually is more dangerous because your sink is then completely contaminated with that bacteria if you're washing it. So skip that washing step. It is not necessary. And also in this study, one of the big things that they took away from it is to make sure your sink is properly sanitized. Your sink can harbor a lot of bacteria. NC State actually did a study where they asked 300 participants, to come in and basically make a salad with chicken. And they watched them. About half of the group, they educated beforehand about not washing their poultry while the other half did not receive the same information. Interestingly enough though, the people who wash their chicken and the people who did not wash their chicken had about 25% of the contamination on their salads. So the washing group and the non washing group, they both had it on their salads. The reason for this. Was due to improper hand washing and not sanitizing their sinks properly. So like we talked about before, washing your hands and sanitizing your sinks are very, very important. When you're talking about sanitizing a sink or sanitizing at home, people might ask what is an effective sanitizer?'cause there's all kinds of products on the market In the food safety world are really three sanitizer solutions that you can use. Iodine, quarian, ammonia, or chlorine. Chlorine is the cheapest, the most readily available one that you can get on the market. It's bleach, and a proper sanitizing solution is one gallon of water to one tablespoon of bleach. So mixing that together and either dipping your dishes in it. Or you putting that in a spray bottle and spraying your countertops with that or putting it in your sink. Filling your sink with a gallon of water and putting the tablespoon and letting that sit in your sink and then letting it go down your drain would be an effective sanitizer solution. Alright, so moving on to our next category, which is separate. When you're talking about separate, you're mainly talking about cross-contamination, and this is when you're touching a raw food to a ready to eat food, like raw chicken to lettuce. And this can happen through food preparation such as your hands or the cutting board or knife you're using. It can also happen in the refrigerator. So if you're not storing things properly in the refrigerator, like let's say you're thawing raw chicken or raw Turkey over top of fresh vegetables, those juices can drip down. So making sure that you're keeping everything separate, you're avoiding cross-contamination. Again, coming back to washing and sanitizing tools and hands between different tasks is also very important. Next on my list is cooking. So I always say it's very important for people to know their proper internal cooking temperatures. When you're looking at animal products, there's really four main temperatures. No, 1 65, 1 55. 1 45 and 1 35. Which 1 35 is mainly vegetable foods. So 1 65 is gonna be any of your poultry items. So around Thanksgiving, this is super important to know because your Turkey needs to be cooked to 165 degrees internal temperature, and when you're taking the internal temperature, you wanna make sure you're taking the thickest or the fattest part of the meat or the poultry, whatever it is. Because if that's 1 65 then the thinnest part will be probably over 1 65. In the show notes, I'm gonna attach a chart that shows all of the internal temperatures, so if you ever have any questions, you can refer back to that. Then ground meats are the next low. Those are 155 degrees, steaks, chops, roasts, fish and seafood are all 1 45. And that's just a little bit of a simple way of looking at temperatures. Also, don't forget the microwave or reheating foods. If you're cooking things in the microwave or reheating, that would be 165 degrees as well. In the last category is chilling. So if you're talking about like Thanksgiving leftovers, the rule for leftovers is that they can be kept in your refrigerator for seven days. Is now, the rule with this is once they are reheated, once they need to be thrown away after that. So it's really important when you're taking out leftovers to only take out the amount you need and reheat it and not the entire amount of leftovers that you have. Because if you don't eat them all, then you would have to throw that away and create food waste. We also need to make sure that we're keeping food out of what we call the temperature danger zone. Which is 41 degrees to 135 degrees Fahrenheit, and this is the temperature in which bacteria multiplies or grows the fastest. So it's going to grow at a very, very. High rate between 41 to 1 35, and you'll notice room temperatures right in the middle there. So I wanna make sure that when we're talking about our high risk foods and some of our high risk foods, just to give you an idea, foods that are at high risk, we're giving you foodborne illness are things like animal products, soy. Cut tomatoes, melons, and lettuce, milk, eggs, cooked grains, baked potato and sprouts. You'll notice like cooked grains and baked potatoes, a potato that is raw, that has not been cooked. Is not considered to be dangerous. Once you cook it and you heat it and you don't cool it properly after that, that's when it becomes dangerous. You also think, see things like people that have rice poisoning or they'll say they got sick from eating rice. It's not when the rice was raw, it's when it was cooked. It did not, it was not cooled properly and that's what caused someone to be sick. So it's very important that we're either keeping those dangerous foods cold in the fridge, or we're keeping them hot above 135 degrees. Also, while we're on the topic of the fridge, let's talk about thawing food. So I hear a lot when I teach food safety classes about people doing this improperly, but really according to our food safety standards, there's four appropriate ways to thaw food. The first one's, the one I do at home. It's in the fridge. Second is under cool running water. Third as a part of the cooking process, or four in the microwave. If you use microwave as your way to defrost meat, you cannot then decide to put it back in. The freezer, or back in the refrigerator even. You just have to cook it right away after that. You can cook it and then refrigerate, but you cannot put that raw meat that's been microwaved back into the fridge. You'll notice I didn't say the sink, which is where a lot of people thaw their meat just sitting in the sink. You are much more likely if there's one tiny little speck of bacteria on that food for it to grow rapidly if it's left out at room temperature. So just be aware of that, that we're thawing meat properly and avoiding that temperature danger zone. So if I have hot food when I'm cooling the food, there's a proper way to do that too.'cause it really shouldn't be sitting out at room temperature for a long time, especially after it's cooked. So the rule is you don't wanna leave it at room temperature for more than two hours. After that two hour mark, if it's cooled, it should be cooled down to room temperature, and then you can just stick it in the fridge. If you're not going to eat something within seven days, mark the date that you made it on and put it in the freezer. Freezing doesn't kill the bacteria, but it will keep the food safe until you cook it. So if you're looking at Thanksgiving, since this is gonna be published in the month of November, and thinking about a very large Turkey and thawing that Turkey, if you're buying it frozen and not fresh. I am gonna include a chart in the show notes, but, and it's one that I share out in our monthly newsletters as well. But just keeping this in mind that it's gonna take a couple days, if not five to six days, for the Turkey to thought, depending on how big it is. So for something like a four to 12 pound Turkey, you're looking at one to three days, but something like a 20 to 24 pound Turkey, you're looking at five to six days to thaw it out. You can also do the water bath thawing with the cool running water that I talked about, making sure that the water does not get above 40 degrees and you have to change water at least every 30 minutes. This would take for a 20 to 24 pound Turkey. 10 to 12 hours and for a four to 12 pound Turkey, two to six hours. So make sure that we're planning ahead on this and not allowing our Turkey to be in that temperature danger zone. After that, you're gonna make sure you're cooking it to 165 degrees. Don't let it sit at room temperature for more than two hours after it's cooked, and then reheating those leftovers to 165 degrees if you do those things. Your food should be safe, and I say should be because there's always variables to food safety, food is never 100% safe. But if you do follow food safety rules, you're at a much better risk of not getting sick. If you're going to a potluck, there are some specific rules about like how long food should stay at room temperature, like I told you before. So there's, in the food safety realm, there's this thing called hot holding or cold holding without temperature control. And that is gonna be something you're doing. Let's say you're going to a party for four hours. What happens to the food?'cause it's sitting out for more than two. So if it's cold food, it can sit out for six hours, as long as it doesn't get above 70 degrees. If it's hot food, four hours. But after that, it needs to be thrown away. You cannot rere refrigerate it and use it later. You must throw it away. So when I used to teach this to my high schoolers, there was a story in one of the PowerPoints that we talked about, about, a buffalo chicken dip. A lady was at a party, the party was at her house. Someone brought Buffalo chicken dip and no one got sick at the party from the dip. But then that night she was cleaning up and she ate some of the dip and became sick. This is because. The food sat out for too long and created a toxin while it was sitting out. So basically her guests all ate it within the four hour mark, but she ate it. Six to eight hours later after it'd set out and it had grown toxins. And what the PowerPoint, when I used to teach it said is that it was staphylococcus A, often found on people's like face or nose or hair. And it produced a toxin that made her sick. So most likely, like someone touched their face and they touched the dip somehow they might have double dipped, something like that. And some of that staphylococcus A got into. That dip and then it produced more and more toxins. So keeping that in mind. In all the things we've talked about today, I hope that some of these little tips and tricks have helped you and that they help prevent you from getting sick, getting someone else sick from foodborne illness this holiday season. Although what I went over today is not exhausted by any means. I hope it helps someone along the way in their food safety journey. I wanna thank you so much for being here today with me, and if you have any food safety questions, please feel free to reach out to me. Again, my name is Lindsay Edwards and I'm your family consumer science agent in Polk County, and I look forward to talking to you next time on the Extension Connection.