On not washing cast iron pans
Are there any food safety concerns with cast iron pans? I’m sure the heat kills any bacteria but it just weirds me out that you can’t use soap...
Once every few years I find a cast iron pan in the trash room of my building. For a few days, I will become ensorcelled with this old-world nonstick technology. I imagine that my eggs will flip easier and my steaks will sizzle louder. Mostly, I am excited about the prospect of restoring a piece of antique cookware.
Me scavenging a cast iron skillet from the trash room
First, I set upon it with steel wool and Clorox just in case the previous owner was using it as a cat box or something. I like to pretend that I’m preparing a corpse for mummification — first I scrub it clean, then I layer on various oils with loving care. Just like making a mummy, it’s a lot of work up front...but if you do it right, it will last an eternity.
Once the pot is in use, you’re not supposed to wash it with soap. (Think of it like APC jeans.) The heat from cooking will kill any bacteria and there’s not much risk of anything growing on the residual layer of oil in the pan. It sounds counterintuitive, but it’s safe. Cooking with a seasoned pan is truly magic: imagine golden grilled cheeses and the slipperiest fried eggs you ever flipped.
Unfortunately, I’m cursed withan insatiable urge to de-season the pan between uses. For me, the most fun part about having medieval cookware is really laying into it with a rough scrub brush and the brute bicep strength of a scullery maid. Of course this removes the oily magic of a seasoned pan so my grilled cheeses blacken and my fried eggs stick. I don’t have room in my kitchen for duplicate pans so inevitably I’ll repurpose it as a catbox and then return it to the trash room. Thus, the cycle continues.
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On eating raw dough
Is raw-egg cookie dough really all that bad for you to eat?
Disclaimer: I have a strict E.A.D (Eat All Dough) policy. I routinely plunge (clean) fingers into mixing bowls and intercept rubber spatulas (with my mouth) on their way to the sink. I’m not above tonguing a whisk.
The concern is that some of the ingredients may have been contaminated with bacteria during the production process, and that a food poisoning risk would exist if those ingredients were eaten raw. The worrisome ingredients in dough are raw eggs and raw flour, which could plausibly contain E. coli and Salmonella if there was some sort of slip-up along the supply chain.
So how risky is eating raw dough?
Here, I fixed it for you
We can’t definitively quantify the risk without testing every batch of dough on a case-by-case basis. In aggregate, the chances of there being harmful levels of bacteria in your personal dough are—and what follows is a scientific term— “really low.” Let’s say there’s a 0.1%* chance that a batch of cookie dough contains hazardous levels of bacteria. This would justify my perfect record of dough consumption. (I’ve never knowingly gotten sick from dipping into the bowl.)
The government, however, promotes the opposite position on eating raw dough: officially, it’s not worth the risk. Even a 0.1% probability of getting sick doesn’t scale well when applied to millions of gluttonous American dough-munchers. This is why the CDC literally built a campaign titled Say No to Raw Dough. They note that eighty people were sickened with E. coli from raw flour between 2016-2019. Is that a lot or a little? Given that there are 63,000 cases of E. Coli in the US each year, bad flour seems like the least of our concerns.
The official image of the Say No to Raw Dough campaign
I guess the CDC’s point is that dough-borne illness would be even lower if fools like us could keep their paws out of the batter. But I’m gonna eat dough, and you’re gonna eat dough, so let’s set some ground rules to minimize injury:
If you belong to an at-risk demographic (e.g. If you are elderly, pregnant, or an internet browsing, blog-reading infant) then don’t eat dough. Just don’t.
If you’re planning a feast of dough, buy pasteurized eggs. It’s easy to tell pasteurized eggs because they’re individually stamped with a “P”.
Eat the dough as soon as you make it. The longer it sits out at room temperature, the more likely it is for bacteria to grough in the dough.
Buy your ingredients at reputable grocers. They’re more likely to remove cracked eggs from the refrigerator display and remove recalled batches of flour from the shelf.
Last point — buying organic ingredients isn’t going to make a difference in the bacteria levels in your ingredients. I mean, keep buying organic but it’s not gonna help in this department.
* 0.1% is a total guess. The real figure is likely much much lower.
On a fridge left ajar
I closed the refrigerator door last night but a wine bottle was sticking out a little and the contact wasn’t made so the light stayed on the whole night, heating up everything on the top shelf so it was warm to the touch.
I know I should throw all of that out but do I also have to throw out the rest of contents? (Things are cooler the lower you go.) And also... do I really have to throw all of that out? What if fridge items weren’t opened? This is such a bummer. Thanks for your help!
Is this a Biden fridge, a Trump fridge, or a joke that no one will remember in 2 months?
I once knew a guy who successfully started a line of bottled beverage that was half-coffee and half-juice. It’s not hard to imagine the origin story here: he groggily reached for the coffee, then groggily reached for the OJ, then groggily determined he would “hack” breakfast by cutting out a step. Silicon Valley, baby! He probably mentioned 2-in-1 shampoo during his investor pitch and it definitely worked because he raised a bunch of venture capital money. It was 2017 and breakfast was ripe for disruption.
One time he gifted a bottle of the stuff to a prospective investor after a pitch. The investor left the bottle on his desk and returned the next day to find the walls splattered with coffee-juice and broken glass. It turns out the coffee-juice wasn’t 100% sterile when it was packaged, which means it required refrigeration to stay fresh. In a midtown investor’s climate-controlled office, the microbes in the juice began to multiply and exert pressure against the walls of the glass. At some point around midnight: Boom!
Now, onto your query. (Thanks for the helpful photo, by the way.)
After 12 hours under that blazing refrigerator light, I would categorize everything on the top shelf somewhere between “science experiment” and I.E.D. You are correct to discard it all. For the rest of the stuff, I’m going to make a two-category list:
For everything else, use your senses. This climate change event in your fridge undoubtedly shortened the shelf life of everything, but you should feel comfortable drinking those milks and alt-milks if they pass a smell test. I’m undecided about the 3+ containers of ricotta. Do you always keep 2 lbs of soft cheese on hand?
Last thing: I make this same mistake all the time because my refrigerator has a faulty gasket. Consider buying a cheap refrigerator thermometer* so you can see how out of wack things have become after using a bottle of wine as an overnight door stop. If the temperature is somewhere in the 50s, you can follow the logic I’ve described above. If your thermometer reads 70ºF or higher, call the bomb squad.
*This is an affiliate link because I’ve decided I need the nickel in sales commission. Also, I own this one and it works. If this offends you then just google Taylor 5925N Classic Design Freezer/Refrigerator Utility Thermometer.
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On dirty dish towels
What's the deal with dish towels? Should I designate one for drying plates and another for mopping up quick cooking spills? My dish towels never smell very good even fresh out of the wash and I'm starting to think I'm doing something wrong here.
Your towels smell bad after laundering because they are sitting wet in your hamper for too long before you wash them. They are getting mildewy. Wash them with a small amount of bleach — this is meant for sanitizing, not whitening — and they should freshen up. If not, chuck ‘em.
I recommend following this two-towel system:
Your Drying Towels: These should be used only for drying clean dishes and clean hands. They can get wet but shouldn’t ever get dirty. Store them hanging (not folded) so that they dry out fully. Replace with clean towels every time the thought crosses your mind, or every few dish-drying sessions.
Your Kitchen Towels: Use these to wipe down surfaces and clean up spills. Keep one folded on the countertop and twenty (yeah, I said what I said) freshly laundered spares in the cupboard. Having a robust inventory of clean kitchen towels will improve your mental health.
Me folding my kitchen towels
Fortunately I’ve never worked under a chef-dictator, but a common practice is for line cooks to get two towels per shift—and a skillet thrown at them if those towels aren’t folded into neat little squares on the bench top. This cutesy standard is so entrenched in restaurant kitchen culture that the health department will issue a code violation for a crumpled dish towel but not a folded one. What’s the food safety science behind this? Uh...unclear.
Here’s my official Nom Nom Vom Vom recommendation for kitchen towels*. They come in bales (when was the last time you bought a bale of something?) and you will experience acute satisfaction when you see them lined up in your cupboard. Also, they’re so cheap that you can buy a ton and it will make you feel wealthy. Last, you can throw them away when they get super dirty and justify it because hey, you don’t buy paper towels anymore.
*This is not an affiliate link because the referral would only net me one dime and four pennies. My integrity and your web privacy is worth at least two dimes.
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On cognitive dissonance
Are there any restaurants you simply refuse to eat at?
My one-time favorite restaurant has a horrible record of food safety. Nobody who is familiar with what I’ll call “The Spot” will be surprised by this. The restaurant is located not inside of a real building but rather in a gap between two buildings that someone paved and put a tin roof over. (New York City, baby!) This means that the internal walls of the restaurant are actually the external walls of the neighboring buildings. The bathroom is a weatherproofed shack with rudimentary plumbing. The tables and chairs are made from plywood and sloppily coated in tempera paint.
The Spot has a distinct vibe of a children’s clubhouse in an abandoned lot and, in fact, the owner once explained to me that his intention was to create exactly this type of informal hangout. The abandoned shanty aesthetic wasn’t part of the plan but budgetary restraints ultimately precluded such luxuries as walls.
The Spot
Fortunately, The Spot serves fried food, which is a great food safety hedge against unsanitary kitchen conditions. Quite simply, frying oil gets hot enough to massacre all bacteria and even mechanically disassemble toxins that regular cooking wouldn’t destroy. If you ever find yourself eating at a dubiously hygienic eatery, remember this fact and indulge yourself in the oiliest delicacy on the menu.
This was my strategy at The Spot and I employed it faithfully — I nom’d no fewer than three egg-gravy-and cheese-on-a-biscuit sandwiches per week for two years. Out of a sense of professional duty I accessed their health department score history in NYC’s public restaurant score database* and discovered a slew of mediocre inspection results. Whether it was a flawed professional assessment or cognitive dissonance, I remained undeterred by these lapses in food safety. Or perhaps it was the sheer convenience of having a four-dollar, eight hundred calorie hot breakfast within spitting distance of my apartment. Like a hippo protecting her offspring, I would kill before letting anything get between me and that precious, dripping glob of sustenance.
But even the health department demerits against The Spot did more to reinforce its beloved character than suggest any imminent health hazards. Sure, the equipment was rusted and the building was not exactly a building—but did I mention the heartbreaking tenderness of those buttermilk biscuits?
There was just one thing that needled me —most of the staff had legitimately horrible food handling practices. The surest way to avoid food poisoning is to have clean hands when preparing food. The general rule is to wash your hands and change your gloves every time you switch activities. So if you scribble down a customer order, you should wash your hands and don new gloves before preparing the sandwich. But most importantly, you must wash your hands after handling money or touching the cash register, because those things are dirrty. It was clear to me that the hands delivering my biscuit sandwiches weren’t getting sudsed up enough.
A career restaurant worker once told me that a restaurant cash register is dirtier than a toilet seat. I shudder to imagine what possible experience could have prompted this specific analogy, but the point stuck.
I knew the staff well enough to mention it a few times—not in an asshole way, I swear!— but it didn’t take. Apparently their boss had instructed them to use as few gloves as possible because “gloves are expensive.” (Official guidance says gloves should be switched at minimum every twenty minutes.)
One time I saw an employee count bills with a gloved hand, wipe his nose, and then pick up a biscuit for slicing. I stepped out of the sandwich line, wiped a tear from my eye, and never went back.
*The historic scores and current inspection ratings have somehow vanished from the database.
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On picking the right milk carton
When I’m grocery shopping I always reach for the milk with the more distant expiration date. Does this really matter?
It never hurts to reach into the nether regions of the supermarket fridge in order to grasp the freshest milk. I always do, because it makes me feel clever. But whether it "matters" depends. If you're a nice happy cow who goes through a lot of milk, it doesn’t matter. If you sometimes end up with expired milk in your fridge, it matters.
But there’s a more important quality indicator than date. (Insider tip alert!) Next time you hit the market, look closely to see if any of the milk cartons are puffy. The "walls" of a carton should be straight-sided. They should not be even a tiny bit inflated. A puffy carton is a sign of microbiological growth inside the container, probably resulting from temperature abuse. (More on that here). That's no bueno.
Maybe the display fridge isn’t quite cold enough and the outer most carton gets a little warmer than the others. Maybe the entire crate of milk cartons was left on a loading dock for too long while the dude responsible for transporting it watched ASMR unboxing videos on YouTube. Whatever the case, warm temperatures will allow “spoilage organisms” (yeast, mold, and some bacteria) to grow in milk. And since these organisms breathe–horrifying, I know–their exhalations remain trapped in the sealed carton. Hence the puff.
The moment you realize the milk still tastes good
Is this milk unsafe to drink? Probably not. Spoilage organisms impart bad flavors and vommy smells on food but they alone won't make you sick. They just degrade the quality of the food to a point where it becomes unappetizing.
So, pop quiz: You’re wavering between the last two cartons of milk at the supermarket. Option A is expiring tomorrow but looks normal. Option B is bloated but has a week left. Which do you pick?
Pencils down. The correct answer is Option A. An expiration date is just a prediction about when the milk will begin to lose peak quality. A bloated carton, on the other hand, means that spoilage is already underway.
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