Food Safety When Cooking

When preparing foods, follow four basic steps—clean, separate, cook, and chill.

Clean

Wash your hands and the counter with hot soapy water, and make sure your utensils are clean before you start to prepare food. Clean the lids of cans before opening. Rinse fruits and vegetables under running water, but do not use soap or detergent. Do not rinse raw meat or poultry before cooking—you might contaminate other things by splashing disease-causing microbes around without realizing it.
Keep your refrigerator clean, especially the vegetable and meat bins. When there is a spill, use hot soapy water to clean it up.

Separate

Keep raw meat, poultry, seafood, and eggs (and their juices and shells) away from foods that won’t be cooked. That begins in your grocery cart—put raw vegetables and fruit in one part of the cart, maybe the top part.
Things like meat should be put in the plastic bags the store offers and placed in a separate part of the cart. At check-out, make sure the raw meat and seafood aren’t mixed with other items in your bags.
When you get home, keep things like raw meat separate from fresh fruit and vegetables (even in your refrigerator). Don’t let the raw meat juices drip on foods that won’t be cooked before they are eaten.
When you are cooking, it is also important to keep ready-to-eat foods like fresh produce or bread apart from food that will be cooked. Make sure your hands, counter, and cutting boards are clean before you begin. Use a different knife and cutting board for fresh produce than you use for raw meat, poultry, and seafood. Or, use one set, and cut all the fresh produce before handling foods that will be cooked.
Wash your utensils and cutting board in hot soapy water or the dishwasher, and clean the counter and your hands afterwards. If you put raw meat, poultry, or seafood on a plate, wash the plate in hot soapy water before reusing it for cooked food.

Cook

Use a food thermometer, put in the thickest part of the food you are cooking, to check that the inside has reached the right temperature. The chart below shows what the temperature inside food should be before you stop cooking it. No more runny fried eggs or hamburgers that are pink in the middle.
Bring sauces, marinades, soups, and gravy to a boil when reheating.

Here's a Tip

Why is it safe for my steak to be pink in the middle, but not my hamburger? When meat is ground to make hamburger, bacteria can be spread throughout the meat. A higher cooking temperature is needed to kill the bacteria inside. But, in a solid piece of meat, any possible bacteria remain on the outer surface where they are killed more quickly.

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