Here are some top tips for a safe and healthy kitchen...all you need to know!

With many of us leading busy lives and being constantly on the go, it’s important to ensure that our busy kitchen is a safe place to store, prepare and cook our foods too.

Here, nutritionist Laurann O’Reilly and owner of Nutrition by Laurann, guides us through her top tips to keep your kitchen safe and healthy.

1) Understanding Food Expiry Dates
It’s important when buying your food products to understand how long they’ll last from a meal planning perspective, to prevent food waste but also to ensure that your health is protected from spoiled food.

- Best Before: Also known as the ‘date of minimum durability’. The Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI) describes this as “the date until which a foodstuff retains its specific properties when properly stored” and applies to “canned, dried, ambient and frozen foods where quality is an issue rather than safety”. So, whilst the quality of the food may deteriorate after this date it doesn’t pose a health issue if eaten past this date.

- Use By: Unlike the best before date, it’s important to consume these food products within this date as they can become a health risk. These foods according to the FSAI are “highly perishable and require refrigeration” and include products such as “milk, minced meat, fish and ready to eat salads”.

- Once Opened Foods: It’s also important to keep in mind that certain foods once opened may need to be consumed within a couple of days to a couple of weeks, so be sure to check the back of the packaging.

- Long Life Foods: There are certain foods that seem to just last forever in the cupboard, but many of these too will eventually ‘go off’ as we say, such as many tinned foods. It may be worth doing a little audit of your kitchen cupboards for products which may be catching dust and ready for the bin.

- Pre-Prepared Foods: As many of us are now getting into the swing of meal planning, which is a real stress, time and money saver, it’s important to remember that pre-cooked foods should only be stored in the fridge for 3-4 days at a maximum. Tip: If you know you won’t eat the food within this time, once cooled you can store it in the freezer and safely defrost it when you’re ready to eat it (see my safe defrosting guidance below)

2) Food Preparation

- Personal Hygiene: This can play an important role in ensuring both the safety of you and your food.

*Handwashing: This goes back to the basics, and we all know how to wash our hands. In terms of food safety, the recommendation is to wash your hands in warm soapy water for at least 20 seconds, before, during, and after preparing food.

*Clean Clothes/Apron: Now this may seem a little far-fetched but if we’ve been out and about in the world all day perhaps on public transport, walking in busy traffic or around animals, we may have picked up a few nasties our clothes, so it’s often safer to do a quick change of clothes or pop on an apron.

- Rinsing Fruit & Vegetables: It’s always advisable to wash your fruit and vegetables as this removes any dirt, bacteria and other potential chemicals from it.

- What Not To Wash: Do not wash meat, poultry, fish, or eggs. If water splashes from the sink in the process of washing, it can spread bacteria

- Safe defrosting: Ideally, frozen food should be covered and defrosted overnight in a suitable container, such as a plate or dish, in the fridge. Only defrost food in a microwave (on the defrost setting) if you are planning to cook the food immediately after it has thawed. Once the food is fully defrosted it is best to cook it straight away. Once cooked it can be stored in the fridge again (for 2-3 days) or frozen (FSAI)

- Chopping Boards & Cooking Utensils: Always keep pre prepared or cooked food separate from raw meats, poultry and fish, using separate chopping boards or cooking utensils or washing between uses.

- Allow A Cool Down Before Refrigerating: Aim to cool food down to room temperature before putting it in the fridge or freezer, as putting food in when it's still warm can raise the temperature of the fridge or freezer higher than the recommended maximum temperatures (see below). Tip: Whilst we require our food to cool prior to storage it’s not recommended to leave the cooked food at room temperature for more than two hours.

3) Understanding Food Storage

- The Fridge: We use it all the time but here are some important things to remember.

*Temperature: The FSAI recommend that temperature of all fridges and chill storage cabinets within the home should be between 0°C and 5°C. If your fridge doesn’t automatically detect the temperature, they suggest purchasing a “non-mercury thermometer (a mercury thermometer should not be used as it may break and contaminate the food)”.

*Organising Your Fridge: Raw meats are a potential source of food poisoning bacteria and must be kept separate from cooked or ready-to-eat food at all times. “To avoid any possibility of cross-contamination of cooked foods with raw foods in your fridge, it is important to always store raw meat, fish and poultry on the bottom shelf of your fridge, with cooked foods stored above them. This will prevent any drip from the raw meats from contaminating the cooked/ready-to-eat foods” (FSAI).

*What Not To Put In Your Fridge: Tins should not be placed in the fridge, the FSAI recommend “removing the contents of the food tin, place them in a suitable container”

*Fridge Door Storage: Be mindful of what you store on your fridge door as each time the refrigerator door is opened, its contents are exposed to warm air, making foods stored there are at a higher risk of spoiling. It’s important for this reason to store foods on the door that can handle the temperature changes

*The Freezer: People often assume that once food is frozen it can stay in there indefinitely, however here are the following recommendations from the FSAI in terms of optimum freezer temperatures and lifespan.

“Freezers should always be kept at -18°C or less. All freezers should have a star rating so consult your manufacturer’s handbook.”

* Runs at –6°C and should only store food for up to one week
** Runs at –12°C and should only store food for up to one month
*** Runs at –18°C and should only store food for up to 3 months
**** Runs at –18°C and is suitable for long term storage (3 to 6 months)

*Fruit & Veggies Storage: Not all fruit and vegetables need to be kept in the refrigerator, for example potatoes and other root vegetables can be stored at room temperature instead and can save you a little space too. Here’s a little guide to what goes where:

* The Counter/Cupboard: Bananas, butternut squash, garlic, onions, potatoes.

*Fridge/Crisper: Apples, asparagus, fresh beans/peas, bell peppers, berries, broccoli, fresh beetroot, Brussel sprout, cabbage, cauliflower, celery, fresh chives, fresh cherries, citrus fruits, fresh corn, cucumber, spring onions/scallions, kale, leeks, leafy greens, mushrooms, peppers.

*Ripen On Counter Then Fridge: Apricots, avocado, melon, pineapple, plums, tomatoes.

Tip: Once fruits and vegetables have been cut, they should be used immediately or placed in a tightly covered container and refrigerated for no more than two or three days.

4) Cooking

To ensure the safety of our foods and that they are cooked through to kill food poisoning bacteria, the core temperature should reach 75°C instantaneously or equivalent, for example 70°C for two minutes. The core is taken as the centre or thickest part of the food (FSAI) Tip: It’s worth investing in a food temperature probe/thermometer to help you safely assess if your food is cooked properly.

- Safe Reheating: Food must only be reheated once following cooking.
The food should be reheated to piping hot, greater than or equal to 70°C at the core of the food, you can use your temperature probe here (FSAI).

5) Understanding Cleaning:

Most of us have gotten well into the hang of cleaning our kitchens at this stage but here are some things to keep in mind.

- Work Surfaces: Always wash the kitchen worktop before you start preparing food, wipe up any spills as you go and clean up straight away after handling raw meat, raw eggs or soil on raw vegetables (SafeFood)

- Equipment: Always wash your chopping boards and utensils with hot soapy water or in the dishwasher after each use and be sure to scrub off any food or bits of dirt. Washing properly is very important if you have used the board to cut raw meat, poultry or seafood (SafeFood)

- Clothes/Towels: Damp cloths, sponges and tea towels are perfect places for bacteria to grow.

If they are not kept clean, they will spread the bacteria wherever you use them.

If you’ve used a cloth to wipe up after raw meat or vegetables, then replace it straight away with a clean one otherwise you can replace every 2 days.

Tip: You can use a hot wash in the washing machine or boil them in water for 15 minutes (SafeFood)

- Consider Other Areas: We often touch other areas of our kitchen and throughout the day so keep in mind the not so obvious places such as door handles, light switches, kitchen cupboards, walls/splash backs and kitchen taps as areas which are important to keep clean too.