Kitchen Hygiene 101: How to Minimize Contamination in the Kitchen

When your job is to prepare and cook or bake food for paying customers, one of your top priorities should be maintaining the highest kitchen hygiene standards. Decreasing the risk of contamination is pivotal and essential in order to protect your customers and yourself from any mishaps.

If you are new to such a business or looking to get a food-based business off the ground, you might not have thought too much about how to maintain the best kitchen hygiene practices. Thankfully, there are some relatively simple ways in which you can mitigate the risk of contamination and keep your kitchen clean.

Here are just a few such tips that will help you to achieve and maintain the highest levels of kitchen hygiene so that you can minimize contamination in your kitchen.

Choose the Right Tools

As someone who makes their living off of cooking or baking food for paying customers, you are no stranger to the fact that you are going to need to have certain tools and utensils on hand each and every day. While you likely have your preferences for such things in regard to quality and overall results, you can also add kitchen hygiene to the list of things to consider when choosing your tools.

For example, you will likely need to have a set of cutting boards on hand in your kitchen for your prep work. Having colour coded chopping boards will help you to keep things straight and reduce the likelihood of cross-contamination when you are cooking.

When you use a red chopping board for vegetables, for instance, and a blue one for meats, you can make it far less likely that cross-contamination in the kitchen will take place. This will help to keep your customers safe and your standards of cleanliness in the kitchen high.

Stay On Top of Dishes

In your quest for better kitchen hygiene, you can’t overlook the significance of washing the dishes. When you allow dirty dishes to pile up unchecked, you increase the chances of harmful bacteria spreading in your kitchen. Moreover, if you fail to wash your dishes in a timely manner, you can find yourself rushing through this process when you are in need of a certain dish.

Washing your dishes isn’t something that can be taken lightly or rushed through. You need to ensure that you are doing this properly and according to industry standards so that you can keep your kitchen and utensils clean and sanitary.

Wash Your Hands

While it is vital that you keep your cooking station, dishes, and utensils clean, there is one more important aspect of kitchen hygiene that can’t be overlooked: your hands. If you aren’t regularly and consistently washing your hands, then you are putting yourself and your customers at risk.

Even if you wear gloves when you cook or bake, it is still important that you wash your hands regularly. Moreover, you should be doing so according to a particular process.