When it comes to keeping yourself and your family healthy and happy, a clean kitchen is absolutely essential! Indeed, keeping your kitchen clean is an important part of general hygiene. Luckily, we know a number of tips that will allow you to keep your kitchen lovely and clean and hygienic!
Top Tips for Keeping Your Kitchen Clean
Your kitchen can be a messy place, between cooking food and all of the washing up. This invariably means that the kitchen itself can be a less than hygienic place if you don’t take proper care of it! Don’t worry, though—our tips will help you to make sure that your kitchen is safe from bacteria and viruses that could be lingering on your surfaces!
#9 Cook Foods Well
This is one of the most obvious tips on our list, it could be argued. When we cook our food, we are not only doing so to make delicious dishes; cooking the food also serves to kill bacteria and other such pathogenic organisms that could be living within the food itself. This is especially the case with meat based foods, which can contain many harmful bacteria that can be highly problematic for our health. As such, never place uncooked food—especially meat—on surfaces that are not easily cleanable—with that being said, though, you should ideally never place uncooked or cooked food on the surfaces to be safe!
#8 Store Food Properly
If you want to make sure that your kitchen is as hygienic as possible, it is important that you store all of your food properly. Don’t leave food out that should be refrigerated for any longer than absolutely necessary, and store all food covered over with wraps to make sure bacteria can’t get in or spread to other dishes in your storage. Use vacuum sealers to store food items. If you do not have a vacuum sealer,you may check this buying guide.
#7 Think About The Bin!
An important rule in the kitchen is to make sure that you are using the bin regularly enough so that food waste and packaging doesn’t end up littering your kitchen. In addition to this, you also need to make sure that you follow some simple bin rules so that you don’t make things worse for yourself; change the bin on a regular basis and always make sure that you don’t over fill the bin. After all, old food in your bin will quickly start to rot and turn bad, and this means that you must change the bin often enough to prevent this from happening. If your bin starts to smell foul, don’t delay; take your bin out and change it with a new bin bag immediately to keep things as clean as you possibly can!
#6 Watch out for Grease!
Grease can be a real nuisance in a property, especially when it comes to cleaning up. All too often, your attempts to clean grease will merely result in this grease ending up spread all over the other surfaces in your kitchen (namely, the wash cloth that you used in particular). This grease provides an excellent breeding ground for bacteria and pathogens, and a fine film of grease may not even be visible to the naked eye; this could mean that your kitchen is far less clean and hygienic than it actually looks!
#5 Watch Out For Cross Contamination
Cross contamination is a real problem for many people, largely due to the fact that people don’t necessarily understand how easy it can be to cross contaminate food with other dishes. This is especially the case when handling meat products, and then transferring the bacteria from these to other food.
#4 Wash Work Surfaces
It is often easy to remember to clean up the dishes and utensils that we have used to eat, but many of us forget or neglect to clean down our work surfaces regularly too. Work surfaces can be home to a shocking number of bacteria and pathogens; as such, cleaning up regularly is an important consideration.
#3 Clean Well!
This should be somewhat obvious, but it is important that you clean all of your utensils and dishes well after use to kill any bacteria. Make sure you clean up floors thoroughly, and use an appropriately powerful cleaner to make sure no nasties get left behind.
#2 Keep the Sink Clean!
Your sink is an important part of your cleaning routine, but how often do you actually clean the sink itself and not just the items contained within it? Your sink may be hosting many different bacteria and so it’s important to clean not only the dishes thoroughly, but also the sink as well.
#1 Wash Your Hands!
There is a good reason that washing your hands well is at the very top of our list, and that is due to the fact that it is so surprisingly easy for us to transmit bacteria (on our skin) to our kitchen’s work surfaces. Our skin can harbor a huge amount of bacteria and so it is important to wash your hands regularly to get rid of these, so that you aren’t spreading them around your house and your kitchen. This is especially true if you have been handling raw meat; always wash your hands immediately after handling raw meat, and make sure not to touch any surfaces directly with your contaminated hands—ask for help, or try to use your elbow (or touch free technology) to make sure you don’t contaminate taps or soap pumps.