Essential Food Hygiene

A brown chopping board is used for root vegetables and unwashed vegetables — potatoes, carrots, parsnips, beetroot, onions and anything that still has soil on it. In the UK colour-coding system, brown keeps the soil bacteria found on unwashed produce away from food that will be eaten without further cooking.

Why root vegetables get their own board <...

A screw in a steak pie is not bad luck. In UK food law it is an offence, and “it was an accident” is not a defence.

Most articles on this subject hand you a definition, list hair and glass and metal, then stop. Fine if you are revising for an exam. No use at all if a customer has just put their fork down and called you over.

So here is the definition first, beca...

Chemical contamination of food is the unwanted presence of a chemical substance in food at a level that could make it unsafe or unfit to eat. Cleaning products, pesticide residues, heavy metals and chemicals created by cooking are the usual examples.

Two things make it behave very differently from the food poisoning bugs most training concentrates on. You cannot cook i...

You came here for a checklist you can print off and tick. I’m going to give you one.

But there’s something you need to know first, because it changes what belongs on that list. There is no official EHO checklist. No published form the officer works down while you hover behind them.

That matters, because most people prepare for the wrong thing. They deep clean, t...