You’ll study food safety as a separate subject in this course. You’ll prepare for a couple of professional certifications, study chapters out of textbooks, take multiple choice tests. For cooks in the industry, though, food safety isn’t a lesson and there are zero written tests — it’s infinitely practical: what cooks have to do (and not do) every single time they’re in the kitchen so they don’t get somebody sick.
While we’re a culinary class, we operate under that same kind of pressure. Lots of people eat the food that comes out of our kitchen, and we have to be careful we don’t get any of them — or ourselves — sick. Plus, the Health Inspector is a real person who makes real visits and hands out real warnings. Nobody wants us shut down over something silly, like a hairnet arranged over a work table instead of on someone’s head, or a dirty chef coat getting buttoned up in the middle of prep.
For all these reasons, this isn’t a food safety course — it’s the practical rules we live by. You have to get 100% on the test to cook with us, because you have to cook safely 100% of the time.
Getting Ready for Class: The Order Matters
Getting ready to cook isn’t a random pile of steps — it’s a sequence, and the order is the point.
Out in the hallway, before you ever step into the kitchen: coat goes on, flip flops come off and kitchen shoes go on, hair gets covered. All of that happens before you cross the threshold.
Then, the moment you walk into the kitchen, bakery, or cafe — you wash your hands.
The last step in getting ready to cook is putting on a clean apron.
A Clean Chef Coat Isn’t About Looking Good
Your chef coat isn’t there to protect your favorite t-shirt, and it isn’t a fashion statement. It’s your first line of defense against all the germs and bacteria you’re carrying around on you — on your skin, your regular clothes, wherever you’ve been before you walked into this kitchen. A dirty coat defeats that purpose entirely. It’s not blocking anything; it’s just another dirty surface hanging directly over your food prep area for the whole class period.
You must come to class with a clean chef coat on dress-out days. That’s not negotiable.
Wash Your Hands Like You Mean It
Not a rinse. Not a courtesy splash on your way to the cutting board. Twenty seconds, soap, hot water, between your fingers, and yes, under your nails too.
You wash your hands:
- The moment you walk into the kitchen — before you touch anything, even before you touch your apron
- After you touch raw protein — chicken, beef, fish, eggs, doesn’t matter what it is, if it came out of the package raw, wash before you touch anything else
- After you touch your face, your hair, or your phone — and if your phone is out at your station in the first place, that’s a separate conversation we’re going to have
Your hands are the thing you touch every single ingredient with. If they’re dirty, everything they touch is dirty. There’s no shortcut version of this rule.
Getting Gloves? Wash First
We keep four sizes of gloves on the wall next to the utility sink. When you’re grabbing a pair, wash your hands first — every time.
Don’t stick your grubby, dirty fingers into the box and rummage around for a pair that fits. Whatever was on your hands is now on every glove you touched while digging around in there, not just the pair you pull out. Wash first, then grab your size.
And by the way… be careful pulling out your gloves. Do your best to avoid spilling them all over the flor.
Clean Apron, Last Step
The apron goes on last, after you dressed for class in the hallway, your hands are washed, and you’re ready to cook… because there’s no point putting a clean apron over a clean coat with dirty, grubby, bacteria-covered little fingers.
Aprons stay in the kitchen. Need to use the bathroom? The apron doesn’t go with you. And if you get a load of greasy chicken splatter on the front of your apron mid-class and you look like you were hit with a drive-by trash can — Change it. The whole reason you’re wearing an apron is to protect your clothes from kitchen splatter. Take it off, tie up the strings, drop it in the laundry bin, and grab a clean one. Don’t wipe it off and keep going.
And on a side note: never, ever, EVER wipe your dirty hands on your apron and get back to work. That’s just nasty.
In the Kitchen
No Soap, No Towels, No Trash Bags? That’s On You
If the handwashing soap is out, if there are no trash bags at your station, if there’s no paper towel to dry your hands with — it’s on you to get what you need and restock it. Not on Chef, not on whoever used it last, not on nobody.
At the end of the day, this is our kitchen. All of us. Taking care of it means noticing when something’s missing and fixing it, instead of working around it or just doing without.
Handling Food Safely
Once you’re geared up and your station’s stocked, the real work starts — and this is where most of what could actually go wrong happens.
Take Only What You Need
If your recipe calls for two pounds of chicken, you pull two pounds of chicken — not the whole forty-pound case, “just in case.” Leave that case sitting out on the counter and someone else is going to be mad at you, and rightfully so.
Treat raw protein like it’s a ticking time bomb, because it is. The longer it’s out, exposed, and not being actively worked with, the more dangerous it gets. Pull what the recipe needs, get the rest back in the cooler immediately, and don’t turn “getting ingredients” into an excuse to leave forty pounds of raw chicken breathing room-temperature air while you hunt down your cutting board.
Keep Raw and Ready-to-Eat Foods Apart
This is where the color-coded boards earn their keep. You already know the system — use it. Raw protein gets its own board, its own knife, its own space on the counter. Anything going straight into a dish without further cooking — lettuce, herbs, anything already cooked and cooling — never touches that same surface without a wash and sanitize in between.
The mistake that gets people isn’t usually dramatic. It’s small: setting the raw chicken breast down on the same cutting board you just diced tomatoes on because you were in a hurry and the board was right there. That’s cross-contamination, and it doesn’t announce itself — the food looks and smells completely fine. That’s exactly why the rule can’t be optional.
Wipe down your station between tasks, not just at the end of class. If you go from raw to ready-to-eat on the same surface, that surface needs a wash and sanitize step in between — no exceptions, no “I’ll just rinse it quick.”
Wash Your Produce
Fruits and vegetables get rinsed before they get cut, every time. It doesn’t matter that it looks clean or came from a sealed bag — it’s been handled, boxed, and shipped by a lot of hands before it ever got to your station. A quick rinse under running water before the knife comes out is non-negotiable.
One Taste, One Spoon
If you’re tasting something on the stove, use a tasting spoon. Once. Don’t dip it back into the pot. The second a spoon that’s been in your mouth goes into the food, everyone whos going to try some of that dish is licking the inside of your mouth. Nasty. Grab a fresh spoon every time you take a taste.
Don’t Let Food Sit Out
Ingredients come out of the cooler when you’re ready to use them, not before, and they go back in when you’re done — not when you get around to it. Diced chicken sitting on the counter while you deal with your mise en place isn’t “okay.” That chicken is climbing into a temperature range where bacteria multiply fast.
Forty-eight minutes moves quicker than it feels like it does. If you pull something out and then get pulled into three other directions, the ingredients you started to weigh or portion? They’re just sitting there the whole time. Build your workflow so that doesn’t happen — pull what you need, use it, and get proteins and dairy back into the fridge as soon as possible.
Close What You Open
Lids stay on. If you’re grabbing flour, you close the bin — you don’t leave it flapping open so the kid walking to the trash can, dripping bacon fat everywhere can accidentally contaminate it. You need some parmesan? Fine. Get what you need from the parm tub, close it, and put it away. you need vinegar? Get what you need and close the cap. Tighten the lid on whatever seasoning you grabbed to make your mac and cheese taste like…. something. Nothing sits open and spilling out on the dry storage table.
Same idea when you’re portioning cold ingredients. If you’re getting butter and only need a little, wrap up what’s left and put it back — or better yet, check if another group needs some too before you tuck it away. That’s how we avoid having twenty pounds of partially-used butter flopping around loose in the refrigerator.
Take what you need, close what you opened, and don’t leave a mess of half-used ingredients for the next person to deal with.
Still Frozen? Cool Running Water Is Your Only Option
If you get to your station and your protein is still frozen, cool running water is the move. Not hot water, and not the microwave — both start cooking the outside of the food while the inside is still frozen solid, which creates exactly the uneven, bacteria-friendly mess you’re trying to avoid.
The real fix happens before you ever get to that point. Next time, plan your mise en place with enough lead time to slack frozen items in the refrigerator the way it’s supposed to be done — planned ahead, not scrambled for in the middle of class.
Cook It to Temp — Don’t Guess
You are required to have a thermometer. This is not an optional tool, nor one you can always expect to borrow from someone else — it’s required. There’s no excuse for showing up without a thermometer, because it’s the difference between a having pleasant memory of the dish you made class (and three hours in the bathroom, crying, begging whatever deity you believe in to “please make it stop”).
“It looks done” is not a food safety standard, it’s a guess, and guessing is how people serve undercooked chicken and don’t find out until later.
Know the target temperature for whatever protein is on today’s menu before you start cooking it, and check it before you plate it. This isn’t about slowing you down — it’s about not serving something that only looks finished.
When the bell rings, your station has to be clean: prepped items stored, labeled, and put away correctly.
If you and your team leave an ingredient out — unlabeled, forgotten, whatever the reason — it’s probably getting thrown away. Not because we’re wasteful, but because nobody knows how long it sat there or whether it’s still safe. Nobody’s going to guess. It goes in the trash.
Whatever you’re not cooking THAT DAY needs to be stored correctly before you walk out the door:
- Wrap it properly — sealed, not just covered loosely
- Label it — slap some masking tape on that thing, use the sharpie that is PART OF YOUR UNIFORM, and label it with contents and date
- Get it in the cooler, like NOW — don’t dare leave food laying on the counter for “just a few minutes” while you chat about the lesson or have a little private dance party while the other students clean up. Food MUST be kept safe. (And that ususally means COLD)
Leftovers that get wrapped wrong, left unlabeled, or forgotten on the counter for twenty minutes after class ends aren’t a minor cleanup issue. They’re the kind of mistake that turns into a real problem down the line — and by the time anyone notices, it’s too late to fix it.
None of this is complicated. It’s not even hard. It’s just easy to skip when you’re moving fast and thinking about the ten other things on your plate — literally and otherwise. The habit is the whole game: wash your hands without being told, keep raw and ready-to-eat apart without thinking twice, and treat the last five minutes of class with the same care as the first five.