Kerry Butler – Food Safety and Handling
Our guest speaker was Kerry Butler, who is Gail’s daughter. Kerry has had a few different careers in her life and after travelling the world cooking in London Ireland and other places, she decided to become a chef so she was here tonight to discuss the situations surrounding Food Safety and Cooking and how we handle our food at our BBQ’s.
Areas of concern with any market BBQ’s are Delivery, Storage, Preparation, Cooking, Serving, Storage and Transportation. We explained we bought our meat from wholesale butcher who traded at the market and transported it in a refrigerated van. After that, it was transferred to a refrigerated container with cold packs to keep the temperature below 5°.
She spoke about area surfaces which should be cleaned regularly and learnt years ago when she was young and worked for KFC that their motto was clean as you go. Points made, were raw and cooked items should be kept separated.
Preparation – raw meat scissors, tongs for raw meats, different tongs for handling the cooked meats and gloves are used when handling any food and a different person to handle money. Changing of gloves should after touching anything else beside the food we are handling.
Uncooked food should be stored at a safe temperate below 5o celsius and that cooked food is cooked property reaching a temperature of above 67o celsius.
After 2 hours, all cooked food needs to be used and after 4 hours it should be disposed of. However, our sausages only last up to 20 minutes as they are sold quickly.
The use of a thermometer should be used for testing the cooking temperature, which should be 67O Celsius which kills any bacteria.
Eggs are a high risk food, not so much from the point of cooking, but from the outside of the egg shell. We need to be careful handling eggs as we all know where they come from. This can cause cross contamination.
Kerry, after asking us a series of questions, was suitable impressed that we followed all the rules as far as good food safety and handling goes.
Gail presented Kerry with a pen for her presentation and thanked her for coming along.
Reporter
Glenda Coswello-McCracken