With the days getting longer and the evenings warmer, more and more La Plata County residents are likely headed outside to use their grills or smokers for cooking. While grilling is a great tool for cooking our food, cooking outside also poses some unique food safety hazards depending on our set-up, especially if cooking for a crowd. To help lessen the risk of food borne illness, we’ve gathered some great food safety tips from our federal partners in food safety, the FDA and USDA.
Regardless of when or where you’re preparing food, shop with food safety in mind. Gathering your refrigerated ingredients from the store just before checking out is a great way to ensure that your cold food makes it back home at safe temperatures of 40 degrees Fahrenheit or less. If you need to drive further than an hour from the store to home, bring a cooler to help keep those foods chilled over the course of your drive. Whether you’re moving your groceries in a cooler or a bag, keep your meats separated by cooking temperatures with the highest cooking temperatures at the bottom and your lowest required cooking temperatures on top. Be sure to keep your ready-to-eat foods such as dairy, deli meats, and fruit and vegetables separate from your raw items to prevent any cross-contamination with foods that won’’t be cooked before eating.
Once you’ve got your groceries home, take some steps to safely get things ready to head out to the grill. If you have any frozen foods to cook, thaw those in the refrigerator until pliable. This could take a few days for some large cuts of meat. In the event that you’re in a rush, you can also thaw foods under cold running water or in the microwave just before cooking. If your recipe calls for a marinade, be sure to keep your marinading products in the refrigerator to prevent harmful bacteria from having the time to grow.
Once your food is ready for the grill, make sure that your grill’s food contact surfaces are clean so any dirt, old food soils or any other environmental contaminants won’t be transferred onto the meal. A good scrub of those surfaces with a metal brush or scrubber while the grill is heating up should be adequate to remove most soils.
Great! Now you’re ready to get cooking. Like getting your groceries home, you want to be sure that you don’t cross-contaminate any of your utensils or other foods when getting food down to cook. Either handle your foods in ascending cook temperatures, like starting with vegetables, then adding your whole muscle cuts of meat, ground meats, then lastly poultry, or dedicate separate utensils for each. Either strategy works, so long as contaminated foods reach safe cooking temperatures for the item with the higher safe cooking temperature. After raw foods are on the grill, be sure to swap out those utensils, plates or cutting boards for clean items. All this effort to prevent cross-contamination would go out the window if you handled your cooked foods with equipment covered in raw foods.
Now that you have your clean utensils, let’s talk cooking temperatures. For fish and whole muscle cuts beef, pork, veal, lamb and farm-raised game, use a calibrated probe-style thermometer to verify that the inside of the thickest part of the meat has reached 145 degrees or above for at least 15 seconds. If burgers or brats are more your preference, ensure that the inside of those ground products reach 155 degrees for 17 seconds or 160 degrees for an instantaneous reading. Lastly, poultry products, wild game and any stuffed meats should achieve an internal temperature of 165 degrees for an instantaneous reading. The USDA has a friendly chart on its website (www.fsis.usda.gov/food-safety) that covers most common meats. The temperature chart is a reminder to print and stick to your fridge or in your kitchen right next to your probe thermometer. Lastly, if you’re reusing your marinade to baste what you’re cooking, be sure to boil your marinade after you pull your meat and before using it as a baste. This will ensure that your glaze or sauce is safe regardless of when you add it.
Now that friends and family are seated at the table with some tasty grub, your food safety has one last worry – what to do with leftovers! The best-case scenario is that everything gets eaten within the first hour or so, but if you’ve stuffed your bellies and there is still plenty of food, you want to get your cooked foods, melons, salads and anything else that requires refrigeration cooling down uncovered in the fridge. A great rule of thumb is that if it’s colder than 90 degrees outside, we have up to two hours to get food into the fridge. If it’s hotter than 90 degrees, we need to get that food in the fridge within an hour of cooking and serving. Eat those leftovers within a couple of days to limit the growth of pathogens and spoilage bugs that are present in the environment.
While this may seem like a lot to remember, good practices like these will ensure that your guests leave happy, healthy and full. Additionally, just like anything else, the more you practice your good food safety habits, the better and more ingrained they’ll become until it’s simply second nature.
Taylor Whitworth, CP-FS, is an environmental health specialist III with the Food Safety program at the La Plata County Public Health Department and can be reached at twhitworth@lpcgov.org.
