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Cooking is a fun activity. You can explore a limitless world of flavor combinations and preparation techniques while making the food you eat or serve to friends and family better. It’s enough to get many people zealous about the craft and ready to dive in immediately. However, don’t let your excitement cause you to skip over our tips for staying safe in the kitchen. You need to make sure you don’t harm yourself or others as you practice cooking, since you’re working with sharp objects and high heat.
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Pay Attention to What You’re Wearing
The first tip you should heed in order to stay safe in the kitchen is to think about what you’re wearing. Overly loose clothes or dangling accessories can get caught on the edges of kitchen appliances or the handles of pots and pans. Even long hair presents a hazard when it’s not tied back. If your clothing, accessories, or hair gets stuck at an inopportune moment, you may be unable to react in time and wind up getting hit with scalding water or other ingredients. Before getting started, remove anything on your person that may snag.
Don’t Cut Meat and Vegetables Together
Unless you adhere to a dietary restriction, you’ll likely handle raw meat, poultry, and/or fish at some point. When you do, you should separate them from any other ingredients you’ll be eating fresh, namely vegetables and fruit. You could unknowingly transfer harmful microbes, which only die off when high heat is applied, from the meat to the veggies. Use separate cutting boards and knives when you’re cutting up meat and vegetables. If you only have one cutting board and one knife, prepare the vegetables first, wash your tools, and then cut the meat after that.
Exercise Care with Your Knives
Speaking of cutting, it’s important that you exercise care when handling knives. Use proper safety methods whenever you’re slicing ingredients. For one, you should curl the fingers of your non-cutting hand as you hold food in place so that you don’t accidentally cut yourself. You also want to make sure the board you’re using is firmly lying flat on the countertop. Furthermore, cut round or slippery ingredients in such a way that you create a stable base from which to perform further cuts. For example, you could cut an apple in half before laying those halves flat sides down to cut them some more.
