News — food hygiene

If you want to know the best way to prep food safely at home, the simplest answer is: use at least 2 separate chopping boards, one for raw meat and one for veg. This one change can cut your risk of raw meat bacteria spreading to ready to eat food by well over half, and it costs less than £50 to set up properly with durable boards that last 5 to 10 years. Why use separate chopping boards for meat and veg in a real kitchen Raw meat can carry bacteria such as Campylobacter, Salmonella and E. coli. When you...

The best material for cutting raw meat at home is a dedicated, non porous chopping board, used only for meat, that protects your knives and can be sanitised after every use. In practical terms, this usually means a high quality hardwood or bamboo board sized around 45x35cm and at least 2cm thick, paired with careful cleaning and strict separation from boards used for bread and vegetables. Why material matters so much for raw meat When you cut raw chicken, beef or pork, the board under your knife is doing three important jobs at once. It needs to: Reduce the spread...

If you want the safest board for everyday home cooking, studies from the University of Wisconsin and UC Davis show that both bamboo and hardwood cutting boards can keep bacterial transfer below detectable levels when they are washed with hot water and detergent within 10 minutes, but bamboo (especially hard moso bamboo) tends to absorb less water and resists deep knife grooves, which slightly reduces long term bacterial harbourage compared with softer woods. What do bacteria safety studies actually say? Several controlled studies over the last 30 years have compared how bacteria behave on bamboo and wood cutting boards versus...

If your main question is “what’s the safest cutting board for bacteria control, bamboo vs plastic?”, current food safety research points to high quality bamboo boards as safer for everyday home use, because bamboo is naturally less porous, can be cleaned at 60–70°C, and shows lower long term bacterial survival in knife cuts than many plastic boards that develop deep grooves. Bamboo vs plastic: what actually happens with bacteria? When you slice chicken or mince garlic, bacteria transfer to the board surface. The two big questions are: how easily do they get into knife grooves, and how easily can you...