- Even confident home cooks may be making food safety mistakes without realizing it.
- Germs can spread fast—wash your hands often, clean and sanitize surfaces and store food the right way.
- Leftovers and cooked foods must be reheated, cooled and stored properly to stay safe and healthy.
As a food writer, I know my way around a kitchen. I keep my pantry well stocked, I’ve hosted dinner parties and holidays, I’ve developed my own recipes and I understand the basics of food safety. But even though I’ve never made myself—or anyone else—sick, I know I’ve made my share of mistakes, too.
Food safety is all about science—and a complicated science at that. All the rules boil down to keeping pathogens and bad bacteria out of your food, be it through storing food correctly, cooking food to the right temperature or keeping your kitchen and tools (hands included!) clean. But it’s far more nuanced than that, and it’s possible that you’re making a few mistakes without even realizing it. I turned to two experts—Meredith Carothers, a food safety specialist with the USDA, and Patrick Guzzle, vice president of food science with the National Restaurant Association—to chat through some of the most surprising (but common!) mistakes home cooks are likely to be making.
1. Not Washing Your Hands After Touching Your Phone
Washing your hands is always the first step of any recipe, even if it’s not usually included in the directions. But most home cooks don’t realize they’ll need to repeat their hand-washing after touching particular items or handling certain foods, like raw meat or poultry. “Our hands touch so many things, which can lead to cross-contamination,” Carothers says. “Think about how many times we touch our smartphones to look up a recipe and then touch food we are preparing.” Your phone is most likely the biggest culprit in your kitchen—one study even found that your phone carries 10 times as many bacteria as a toilet seat. (Another object you’ll definitely want to wash your hands after touching!) When you wash your hands, do so for 20 seconds with soap and clean, running water.
2. Cleaning Surfaces But Not Sanitizing Them
While most home cooks know that knives, cutting boards and counters should be cleaned after they come in contact with raw meat or poultry, they most likely don’t realize that washing these items with soap and water alone (or using a multi-purpose cleaning spray) isn’t enough to disinfect them and clear them of pathogens—a must to avoid cross-contamination, Guzzle says. After washing these items to clear away grime and grease, he suggests wiping them down with a Clorox disinfecting wipe, or spraying them with a solution of one tablespoon of bleach combined with room-temperature water. “In no way are we trying to suggest, hey, take a bunch of bleach and dump it on your food,” he says. “Just a small amount of bleach mixed with room-temperature water will be very effective.” If your dishwasher has a dry cycle or sanitizing cycle, that can also do the trick—just make sure the items you’re sanitizing are dishwasher-safe.
3. Not Reheating Leftovers or Casseroles to the Correct Temperature
When I’m grilling burgers or cooking Thanksgiving dinner, I always have an instant-read meat thermometer on hand. When I’m microwaving last night’s leftovers or making my Tuesday night easy with a freezer meal, though? Not so much. It turns out that just like meat, poultry and fish, your leftovers and casseroles should be cooked to a specific temperature: 165 degrees. And while dry pasta is perfectly safe stored at room temperature, cooked grains, pasta and beans are not. “Once they’re cooked, they need to be then either kept hot or they need to be refrigerated and kept cold,” Guzzle explains. “The cooking process denatures the food a little bit. It puts that starch into a form that can support rapid [bacterial] growth.” That’s because cooked grains and beans have a higher water activity (or the ratio of water vapor to the food itself) than dried, and a higher water activity is more conducive to bacterial growth.
4. Following Expiration Dates But Not Checking for Spoilage
I grew up in a house where expiration dates were treated like a suggestion, not a rule. My husband? He takes them as gospel. Turns out, my family’s laid-back approach is actually the correct one, according to the USDA. “Food product dating can be tricky to understand, and many consumers either keep their foods for longer than we recommend for home storage guidelines or they throw away food before it truly needs to be,” Carothers says. Whether your food is labeled as “use by” or “best by,” these dates are not an indicator of the product’s safety—unless it’s baby formula. These are quality dates, set by the manufacturer, in accordance with the USDA’s guidelines, and are to help stores and consumers use products when they are at peak freshness. If it’s past that date, you’ve stored the item correctly and no spoilage is evident, the food should still be safe to eat. Spoiled foods will have an off odor, flavor or texture due to spoilage bacteria—signs that you should toss them.
5. Leaving Food Out for Too Long While It Cools
If you’ve just meal-prepped for the week or have a bunch of leftovers to put away, it can be tempting to let them sit out on the counter until they cool before putting them in the fridge. That’s tempting fate, Guzzle says, as food shouldn’t be left at room temperature for longer than two hours. “I recommend going ahead and covering it loosely and putting it in the refrigerator as soon as you can,” he says. “Getting them back under temperature control as soon as you can will always help food safety.” Keeping the food loosely covered will allow for cool air to flow and cool your food faster—and while, yes, stocking warm items in the fridge can heat the fridge up a degree or two, Guzzle says that most fridges are designed to counteract that to keep food below 40 degrees. To help food cool down even faster, he recommends storing it in small single-serving containers rather than a large serving plate, bowl or tray.
Our Expert Take
Keeping your hands, work area and tools clean and sanitized are the first steps to following food safety guidelines. You also want to make sure that food is stored properly and is cooked at the correct temperature. Always wash your hands after touching potentially contaminated surfaces or items (like your phone or raw meat), and sanitize counters, cutting boards and knives after working with raw meat or poultry. Keep grains, beans and pastas out of the danger zone, and refrigerate leftovers as quickly as possible after cooking.
