This week I am going to be talking about Food Safe and what to expect in a kitchen. Being organized is key to being food safe; you always want things in the place that they need to be. Mise En Place is a common culinary term for everything in its place. What this means is that you need to be able to walk through your kitchen and almost blindly know where everything is. You can’t accomplish this with a dirty and disorganized kitchen. So, there are simple and easy ways to achieve this with just some simple standard and practices to follow.
First things first is having what called a food safety plan; this will be the reference guide to all your kitchens food needs. This guide is there so not everything you have in your kitchen written down has the 3-page explanation of how to accomplish something by Food Safe standards. This allows an employee to look at the reference page number on a recipe or whatever literature that matches the job at hand in the reference guide (food safety plan) and accomplish it that standard. This is something that will take a little time to write, and you will have to browse the internet or call your local health authority for specific details to where you live depending on the job you might be doing. This reference guide can contain information for guides for cooking temperatures, cooling logs, reheat logs, even info on transporting hot or cold food and time charts for things like buffets. These are handy guides that can be utilized for any type of food service.
After that depending on what kind of service you want to run and how often you wish to serve the same food, your mise en place (prep list) and standard recipe sheets are where a cook gets his organization and speed. These allow your staff to execute tried and true recipes of your without fail and most times with the most basic culinary knowledge. This system makes it easier to avoid chaos and confusion in the kitchen; it just means that there is a little extra work like perfecting a plate before a customer sees it (which they still might now like). Then writing it down in the simplest way so anyone could take and achieve the same plating as you. Maybe not as precise, but that’s up to you the chef to fine-tune your staff to be as exact as possible.
The final bit of information is about the closing and an in-depth cleaning checklist. These are my opinion essential to someone closing down a station and or kitchen. After a hard day, anyone can forget something it happens; we are all human. So, having a checklist allows a staff member or even yourself to check the work you did and make sure that you did the job to its completion.
I hope you enjoyed this week’s blog. Please feel free to comment and ask questions on how to set up these guides or how to establish good Food Safe protocols. Be sure also to check out my tips page where I am sure some Food Safe tips will pop up there any day now.
Have a great week and I will see you next week. Please share this site with your friends.
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