Okay Who s Cutting Sam s Onions Again
Anything that touches your food tin can be a source of contagion and foodborne illness – including cutting boards.
For case, if you cut up a raw craven, and then apply the same cutting lath to slice a tomato for your salad, yous run the take a chance of cantankerous-contamination – with bacteria from the craven being transferred to the lycopersicon esculentum. That, of course, would be bad.
And vegetarians aren't off the claw either. Fruits and vegetables can as well bear pathogens (and transfer them to cutting boards).
To reduce the risk of foodborne illness in your kitchen, here are some things you should know about cutting boards.
Plastic Versus Forest
For a long time, about (if not all) cut boards were made of forest. But at some point people began using plastic cutting boards. The idea was that they were easier to clean (and sanitize), and therefore were safer.
Only in the late 1980s, a UC Davis researcher named Dean Cliver – the de facto godfather of cutting board food safety – decided to investigate whether plastic cut boards really were safer. Respond: not really.
Plastic cutting boards, Cliver found, are easier to sanitize. But cut on them too leaves lots of grooves where bacteria can hide. Wood is tougher to sanitize, simply information technology'southward besides (often) tougher in general – you won't find as many deep scratches in the surface.
In addition, researchers accept discovered that the type of wood your cutting board is made from also makes a difference.
"Hardwoods, like maple, are fine-grained, and the capillary action of those grains pulls downwardly fluid, trapping the leaner – which are killed off as the board dries afterward cleaning," says Ben Chapman, a food safety researcher at NC State. "Soft woods, like cypress, are less probable to dull the edge of your pocketknife, but also pose a greater food safety risk," Chapman explains. "That's because they have larger grains, which allows the forest to split apart more than hands, forming grooves where bacteria tin thrive."
Which type of cut board should you use? Chapman recommends using plastic cutting boards for meat and woods cutting boards for fruit, vegetables, or any set-to-eat foods (similar staff of life or cheese).
Why employ plastic cutting boards for meat? Because of how you wash them.
Cleaning Your Cut Lath
Plastic and wood accept dissimilar characteristics, and so you accept to handle them differently.
Plastic cutting boards tin can be placed in the dishwasher, where they can be sanitized by washing at loftier temperatures. But wood cutting boards would quickly be ruined past a dishwasher, and not everyone owns a dishwasher. If you're washing a cutting board by hand, you should:
- Rinse the droppings off the cutting board (being careful non to splatter contaminated h2o all over the place);
- Scrub the cutting board with soap and water (to get out annihilation in the scratches or grooves on the board'southward surface); and
- Sanitize the cutting board (you should employ dissimilar sanitizers for wood cutting boards than for plastic ones).
For plastic cutting boards, you should utilize a chlorine-based sanitizer, such as a solution of bleach and water (ane tablespoon of bleach per gallon of water – has a shelf life of a week or two). But for forest cut boards, you should apply a quaternary ammonium sanitizer, such as a solution of Mr. Clean and h2o (follow the dilution instructions on the label).
"This is because chlorine binds very easily to organic materials, like the woods in a cutting board, which neutralizes its antibacterial properties," Chapman says. "Quaternary ammonium is more effective at killing bacteria on wood or other organic surfaces."
Information technology'due south worth noting that yous should likewise sanitize your kitchen sponge/rag/brush after you've used it to scrub the craven-juice off your cut board – or else you run the gamble of contaminating the next thing you wash (which is the exact reverse of what you're trying to do).
The last stride in cleaning your cutting lath is an important one – dry out information technology.
"Make sure you put the cut lath somewhere that air circulates, so that it tin can dry completely," Chapman says. Bacteria demand moisture to grow, and you don't want to give them a welcoming environment.
"Historically, butchers used to put table salt on their butcher blocks to keep them from smelling bad," Chapman says. "This worked because the salt drew the moisture out of the forest and prevented bacterial contamination, which is what caused the smell – though the butchers didn't know information technology at the time."
When To Replace Your Cutting Lath
At some bespeak, scrubbing and sanitizing might not be enough. When your cut board has accumulated a lot of deep grooves from repeated use, y'all probably need to replace it.
"The more grooves it has, and the bigger they are, the more area is available for trapping moisture and giving bacteria a place to proliferate," Chapman says.
Source: https://news.ncsu.edu/2014/09/cutting-boards-food-safety/
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