8 Kitchen Cleaning Hacks to Prevent Food Poisoning

8 Kitchen Cleaning Hacks to Prevent Food Poisoning

The kitchen is where you take care of food, prepare it, and present it to your guests sometimes.

Whether you’re working in the food industry or not, it is of your best interest to ensure that you keep your kitchen clean at all times. Otherwise, you run the risk of getting food poisoning because your food isn’t safe to eat.

To avoid that at all costs, you need to build a solid cleaning habit for your kitchen.

Here are eight kitchen cleaning hacks (and general rules) to get you on the right track, which will help you prevent food poisoning:

1. Wash your hands often

Whether you work in the food industry or not, you need to wash your hands often whenever you’re handling food.

When you’re handling one type of food and another, especially when touching raw meat and eggs, you should be washing your hands when switching. That way, there’s no cross-contamination happening.

There’s a reason why you want to wash your cutting boards or have a separate cutting board entirely for raw meat and your vegetables.

Also, recent experiences should have made it obvious how crucial it is for our health to develop a handwashing habit. Remember to sing the Happy Birthday song twice when washing hands to be able to clean it thoroughly.

2. Sanitize your work surfaces

The area where you’re preparing your food also needs some care and attention.

If you’re going to be handling food all over, make sure that you clean and sanitize your work area first. Kitchen counters especially need to be sanitized before you use them. We’ve placed everything from bags, keys, and even sat on kitchen counters.

That’s why you need to sanitize your work surfaces to cook or prepare food as much as possible. The handy-dandy soap and water combination is enough for the job.

You can use antibacterial solutions, but don’t use it too often either. For an extra step, you can get yourself a handheld steam cleaner also.

3. Wash kitchen tools before using

From your hands to your work area, we’ve covered most of the things in the kitchen that deal with food directly. Another obvious cleaning task that you should be doing to prevent food poisoning would be cleaning your kitchen tools.

Ensure that you always wash your kitchen tools before you use them. Even if you’ve cleaned them before, you never know if you forgot to do that.

It would be best to clean the kitchen utensils and tools before you use them. From your knives to your washing boards, all of them need a cleaning.

When cleaning your kitchen tools, again, soap and water are plentiful. Use warm water so that it’s extra significant for you.

4. Clean range hood with oil

When you’re cooking, your range hood will be dealing with all sorts of spills and splashes. Many people forget to clean under the range hood, so it becomes harder to clean that part over time.

Since the range hood deals with many greases, you have to prepare to clean it out when you clean your range hood.

One cleaning hack you probably didn’t know could help with the grease buildup on your range hood would be to use oil. All you need to do is put a few drops of vegetable oil on your range hood and grab a cloth.

Wipe your range hood all over until you see that the grime is gone. It’s that simple.

5. Stop leaving dirty dishes

Here at Maid Sailors Home Cleaning Services NYC, we believe that the more work you do now means less work for you in the future.

If you have too much on your plate at the moment, you’re going to overwhelm yourself. You won’t be able to finish or start at all and would want to procrastinate even more.

That’s the reason why we think you should stop leaving dirty dishes when you’re too lazy to clean them after eating.

Not only will it make you develop a bad habit, but it’s also making your dishes a breeding ground for germs and bacteria. Not to mention the fact that it will be attracting pests into your house. As soon as you use the dishes, clean them to avoid this issue.

6. Clean from top to bottom

When you’re cleaning any room, including your kitchen, make sure that you clean it from top to bottom.

The top is hard to reach, and you probably don’t clean it often, which means that a lot of dust has accumulated there. If you clean the bottom first, once you start cleaning the top, the dust will fall all over your hard work.

Instead of losing all that hard work, all you need to do is switch up the order of your cleaning tasks. Start from the top to bottom when cleaning.

7. Empty the trash daily

Without you knowing it, pests and all sorts of critters can be crawling around your kitchen counters. After all, they’re attracted to food.

Since the kitchen is the hub of food in your home, they’re going to want to hang out there. You’re going to compromise the sanitation of your kitchen in that case.

One of the places that attract these pests in your kitchen would be the trash bin. If you don’t get rid of the trash and empty it daily, you will have food debris in your waste that attracts these pests.

Aside from that, the stench can also stick around. That’s why you should empty the trash daily.

8. Always clean your appliances

Cleaning kitchen appliances isn’t a daily cleaning task for most of us, which is fine. What happens here is that we go for far too long without cleaning our kitchen appliances.

The rule of thumb is that if you use a particular machine often, you’re probably going to need to clean that more often than you think.

Ovens are a prime example of kitchen appliances that you don’t clean often. To ensure that you’re not affecting the food you use your kitchen appliances, make sure that you always wash them after using them. Deep clean them after a while too.

With these eight kitchen cleaning hacks, you’ll be able to keep a clean and sanitized kitchen for yourself. It will ensure that the food you prepare isn’t compromised and won’t cause you health problems, like food poisoning. Keep these habits up so that you can always have a kitchen that you’re confident is safe.

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