Christine Dantz, Author at Safe Food For Thought

March 19, 2018March 10, 2018

Food and Handling Course for Seasonal Menus

As the chill of winter recedes, many restaurant managers rotate warm comfort foods off of their seasonal menus in pursuit of fresh ingredients. Rotating menus seasonally can be a great way to keep your loyal clientele returning to find new dishes available and bring out the best in your creative kitchen staff.

Seasonal Menu Food and Handling Course Guidelines

Each season brings its own food safety challenges and the upswing in fresh ingredients spring offers creates some cause to take extra precautions. We’ve isolated a few issues you may want to consider as you bring in the ingredients for your fresh new menu:

Proper storage of fresh proteins
Proper washing of fresh fruits and vegetables
Review of holding procedures for new hot and cold items

Most food and handling course protein storage guidelines tell you to store your product on shelves in descending order of final cooking temperature. For example, whole raw pork would be stored above ground meats and poultry products must always be placed on the lowest shelf. Most seafood products will have the lowest cooking temperature, but we recommend you find a separate storage location for fish and shellfish that is not on a shelf over any other product. Some of your guests may suffer from seafood allergies, so taking precautions to prevent cross-contamination is a must.

Spring also brings an abundance of fresh produce. Remember to wash all produce that will be cooked or served raw, even if you bring in organic ingredients. Washing produce removes residue left from pesticides, fertilizers or dirt that remains on fruits and vegetables.

Finally, review hot and cold cooking and holding temperatures with your staff. Raw seafood items are particularly popular in the spring and summer when fresh ingredients can be purchased. If you serve sashimi, sushi or seafood tartare, spend some extra time reviewing cold holding and cross-contamination prevention.

Do you choose to rotate your menus with the seasons or do you have other ideas for keeping the food you serve fresh and relevant?

March 12, 2018March 10, 2018

A Lesson in Improper Food Safety Training from South Africa

While we usually focus on food safety training in Minnesota and food-handling issues in the United States, the listeria outbreak in South Africa is too big of a news story to ignore. With a death toll around 200, this outbreak breaks records as the largest listeria case in the world.

A Food Safety Training Case Study and a South African Outbreak

Investigators have traced the source of this outbreak to a South African processed meat product called polony. The listeria bacterium found on the exterior casing of this meat product poses an incredibly high probability that other products have also become contaminated. The risk of cross-contamination from this outbreak prompted health officials to recommend that the residents of South Africa avoid consuming any ready-to-eat processed meat products. Between January and March, nearly 700 cases of infection from this strain have been confirmed, and this outbreak has a staggering 27-percent fatality rate.

It’s vital that we don’t simply write this outbreak off as happening in another country because it doesn’t affect food producers in Minnesota and the United States. This product may never be sold in our stores, but it should serve as a dire warning as to the consequences of a lack of food safety training, especially with something as preventable as listeria poisoning. Now could be a good time to review hand washing and equipment sanitation procedures with your staff since many cases of listeria begin with improper sanitation procedures.

Have you been following this major food safety story and has it impacted how you look at basic food handling training?

March 5, 2018March 5, 2018

Food Safety Certified Procedures for Produce

In ServSafe training, food safety certified professionals learn that washing raw fruits and vegetables before serving helps prevent the spread of food borne-illness. We all know that plants grow in the dirt, and dirt contains bacteria that can be harmful if consumed. Some farms utilize fertilizers and pesticides to yield a larger crop, and residues of these compounds may still exist on the surface of fruits and vegetables. We’d like to suggest that restaurants develop standards that require all produce to be washed before any use.

Washing of Produce and Food Safety Certified Standards

Even if you plan to cook your fruits or vegetables, there may be a chance that pathogens on their surface can spread. During preparation, they will inevitably come into contact with knives, prep surfaces and hands that will then go on to touch other items in your kitchen.

Produce ingredients that often go unwashed include fruits and vegetables with peels or rinds. Some examples of these include:

Carrots, beets and other root vegetables
Avocados
Melons
Oranges, pineapples and other tree fruits
Thick-skinned squash such as pumpkins and butternut squash

During classes prepared for food safety certified managers, we’ve often been asked why we feel it’s necessary to wash these items before preparation; the customer will never eat the peels. Your knives and peelers can come into contact with contaminates on the surface of these ingredients and then become infected. The grooved surface of a cantaloupe, for example, contains many nooks and crevices for bacteria and remnants of fertilizer to reside. As you slice through the surface, your knife can pick up these microscopic particles and spread them to the meat of the fruit as your knife passes through. The same theory can be applied to a peeler that picks up contaminates while root vegetables are being prepared.

Washing all produce is just one small way to prevent food-borne illness, and should never be overlooked. Can you think of any small, but necessary, procedures you feel gets forgotten far too often.

February 26, 2018February 8, 2018

Food Manager Training And When To Recall Products

Nothing completes a freshly toasted bagel like cream cheese, but in the month of January, Panera Bread customers had to settle for a substitute. After a sample from a single batch of one of their flavored cream cheeses tested positive for Listeria, Panera Bread made the decision to recall all cream cheese products in their restaurants, regardless of production date. This week, we’d like to explore Panera’s recent decision from a food manager training perspective. Bearing in mind their efforts to keep customers safe, especially considering the number of high-profile food-borne illness outbreaks we’ve seen over the past few years.

Recalls and Food Manager Training

Panera’s press release is very clear that only one batch of flavored cream cheese produced on a single date contained a tainted sample and that no cases of food poisoning have been reported. So was recalling product already shipped and produced on different dates really necessary?

When studying bacteria in food manager training classes, we learn that Listeria is a potentially deadly pathogen, especially to the elderly, children and those with weakened immune systems. Extreme caution should always be taken when there is even the remote possibility of releasing food tainted with Listeria into the food supply. In this current case, we support Panera Bread’s decision to exercise an abundance of caution. Even one unnecessary death from food poisoning is too many.

While only one batch tested positive, there is always the remote possibility that tainted product may have snuck its way into the restaurant chain’s distribution system. In a past blog, we explored the potential fiscal repercussions of ignoring food safety protocols. Taking aggressive steps when it comes to preventing food-borne illness not only makes a great deal of sense from a safety standpoint, but from a financial standpoint as well. While Panera may have decided to take a short term loss by disposing of more product than just the batch that had been confirmed contaminated, they may have saved themselves a massive loss in the long run with their caution.

We applaud Panera’s procedures in this case. Considering what you have learned during online food manager training courses and instructor led ServSafe classes, do you agree?