Barbecue food safety tips
 As a barbecue chef, you are not only responsible for your guests’ enjoyment – you also have the pressure of being responsible for their health!
Here BBQ.co.uk presents its top tips to help keep your food safe and your guests healthy.
Avoid cross-contamination
Most people buy everything they need for a barbecue in one quick dash round the supermarket – and if that sounds like you then the packing of your purchases is key. If you have bought raw meat, make sure you pack it in a separate bag to your vegetables and sundries. If you don’t, juices from the meat can drip onto the other items and cause contamination.
As soon as you’re home from the shops, refrigerate the goods – again keeping raw meat and vegetables away from each other. If you don’t plan to use the meat for a couple of days, get it in the freezer as soon as you have the chance.
Cross-contamination can take place on the grill itself, so always keep raw meat away from partially, or fully, cooked meat.
Defrost frozen goods thoroughly
Make sure you thoroughly defrost frozen meat in the fridge 24 hours in advance of your barbecue. Don’t simply let it defrost on a work surface at room temperature.
If you don’t have time to defrost in the fridge, most microwaves have a “defrost” feature which helps to thaw food in a matter of minutes. Be certain the food isn’t still frozen in the middle before putting it on the grill.
Get a head start
Microwaves are also very useful for starting off the cooking process, thus reducing grill time. You can even finish one dish on the barbecue while you start another in the microwave.
If you do adopt this approach, be warned that you need very good timing! You can’t allow the food to cool down after pre-cooking in a microwave, it needs to go straight onto the preheated grill to finish off – so you’ll have to make certain the barbecue is clear and ready for use.
Cook it through
The one golden rule of safe barbecuing is to cook your food right the way through. Exposed to a very high heat, food will brown – even blacken - very quickly, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the centre is cooked.
One way to find out is to simply cut to the centre and check it's colour - if your chicken, pork, sausages, burgers or kebabs are at all pink in the middle, leave them grilling. If you don’t want to spoil the presentation of your food by making a large incision, there are meat thermometers available which help you determine when your food is fully cooked.
Use clean equipment
Before handling food, cooked or otherwise, wash your hands and any utensils you plan to use. Also, use a separate set of utensils and plates for any raw meat, so that bacteria won’t be transferred onto safely cooked food.
The list of rules may seem lengthy, but in practice it does nothing to hinder the alfresco experience. As the old adage claims, “If something’s worth doing then it’s worth doing properly” – and we all know a barbecue is definitely worth doing!
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