Mulberry Creek Farm CSA

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Sustainable Table: Food Safety

Food Safety Begins on the Farm booklet

How Safe is Your Kitchen interactive checklist

Food Safety FAQ

It really does make a difference, you know. And you probably already do a lot of these things from simple common sense. But here are a few tips for basic kitchen and food handling safety.

1. Wash. Wash your hands. Wash before you even start getting out your ingredients and equipment. Wash when switching from one raw ingredient to another, especially something messy. Wash after you're done. Wash the utensils and bowls. Wash the cutting boards. Wash the counter. Wash the table. Just wash. If there's only one thing you do, do this.

2. Use different knives and cutting surfaces in preparation of raw meat and produce. Icky germ-bugs from raw meat (and its associated blood and other ewy stuff) gets down in the cracks of even the best cutting boards. So don't cut your carrots for the salad on the same cutting board you just rinsed off after chopping up a chicken.

3. Sterilize your equipment, especially that used to process raw meat. My mother insists that her wooden spoons and cutting boards last longer when washed by hand. Personally, I stick everything in the dishwasher because there is no way I can get the water in the sink hot enough to sterilize it. An alternative, if you're like Mom, is to nuke them. Just stick your wooden stuff in the microwave on high for 30 seconds or so (not sure about the time - and make sure there isn't any metal in it!). Another alternative is to sanitize by spraying vinegar or hydrogen peroxide on the wood. You can find lots of info by googling.

4. Follow recipe instructions, including those on pre-packaged stuff. If it says to let boil for X amount of time, it may be as much about killing bacteria as about getting the thing soft.

5. Take advantage of your refrigerator and freezer. Don't leave stuff out overly long - while food doesn't usually spoil instantly if left on the counter by accident all afternoon or even over night, its life span will be shortened.

6. Finally, don't visit our kitchen as a model of food preparation safety! We're farmers - we have stuff sitting around all the time! (But not what we sell you! That goes in the fridge right away ... which is one reason ours gets left out!)

We get asked all the time things like "how do I know if my eggs are fresh?" "what's the difference between brown and white eggs?" "will I find a baby chick in my egg?" All are valid questions, so we decided to add this page! (By the way, these are our "from the farm" answers - please don't quote us as official experts!)

Are brown eggs better than white eggs? Fundamentally, no. The color of the shell has no bearing on the quality of the egg inside. The reason brown eggs have been seen as healthier is that the commercial egg factories use breeds of chickens that crank out large eggs quickly - and White Leghorns happen to be the best at that. So brown eggs, which are usually smaller than White Leghorn eggs, are more of a speciality in the marketplace. Many breeds raised on small farms produce eggs of various shades of brown. The quality of the egg comes not from the color of the shell, but from the quality of life of the hen that laid it, what she was fed, and so forth.

How fresh is fresh? Now there's a can of worms. See more below. Here are a few thoughts based on our personal practice and observation.

1. A hen sits on an egg for 21 days without it going bad.

2. People survived (thrived) for centuries eating eggs that came out of a bowl sitting on the kitchen counter or table. We eat eggs all the time that have never been refrigerated (although the eggs we sell go into the fridge right as soon as they're cleaned up!). The trick is to actually cook the eggs before you consume them.

3. If you cook the egg thorougly you're not likely to get sick from it. (Egg related illness seems to come almost entirely from eating eggs that have not been cooked through or at all, including stuff that raw eggs are in, like cookie dough.) COOK YOUR EGGS THOROUGHLY!

4. If it floats, don't eat it! If it smells funky, don't eat it!

TIPS:

Once eggs are refrigerated, they need to remain refrigerated.

Fresh eggs keep longer than hard boiled eggs, but hard boiling an egg will extend it's life. Another way to say this is that if you take two eggs that were laid today and hard boil one then stuck them both in the fridge, the hard boiled one would go bad first. But if you take that non-boiled egg and a week or two down the road boil it, it will last a bit longer.

Successful hard boiled eggs need to be at least a week old. Very fresh eggs won't peel well, no matter what tricks you use. (By the way, the eggs you buy at most grocery stores are often a good week old by the time you take them home.)

Will I find a baby chick? Yes, we have been asked this question, and more than once. The answer is, No. If you have an interest in egg fertility, incubation process, and etc, please let us know. In the meantime, we'll let this single word suffice.

The USDA says one thing, the Egg Safety people say something else, and everyone is confused - when are eggs safe to eat and when aren't they?

The Egg Safety Center

How to Tell if an Egg is Bad