There was a discussion on Group Blog when Pauline thought she might have gotten "food poisoning" from eating an unwashed organic strawberry at Farmer's Market.
I thought about restaurants, and wondered to what lengths they go to make sure produce is well cleaned before serving.
Dean, I thought you could help answer that question. Please share your trade secrets .
Charity
Posts: 1486 | Location: Santa Barbara, CA, USA | Registered: 11 May 2003
Eloise, that is true. Even on the food network if you watch the Barefoot Contessa, she will tell you never to wash raspberries; it will spoil them. Many chefs will also tell you not to wash mushrooms but to merely brush them off with a wet papertowel as otherwise the mushrooms will absorb the water.
I asked my daughter the other day just what she thought she was removing with a spray of cool water, other than possible sand? So I dunno about restaurants and we don't have FIT here, but a consumer show said to bathe produce in argilla verde, known as green clay there, then rinse. Does it actually remove pesticide? I dunno, but the government claims it will. I know you can get amoebic dysentary from unwashed produce where the wrong things are used as fertilizer. I should think it is rare in most developed countries, but who knows?
In Italy chfs suggest washing the strawberries befor4 eremoving the top leaves. On washing, essentially, the water can seep inside the strawberry, if the top leaves have been removed, diluting the flavor (and sometimes they are so flavorles already...).
Man, oh man, do I want to stay away from this one. Errrrrgh. But Diana, I can hear you from your hill!
I feel like whatever I say, I will look bad to somebody out there, so please, be kind to me.
To answer the original question, we use water, lots and lots of fresh, running water. Remember, most of the veggies we use are peeled before we use them. For leafy greens, we have a salad spinner the size of a clothes dryer and we soak greens in fresh cold water, changing it several times, and spin them dry.
I don't know of, nor have worked in a restaurant, that uses bleach or chemicals to clean vegetables.
Washing berries breaks them down immediately, except for blueberries...a strawberry can be rinsed right before serving, and like Alice said, before the hull comes off, but even with the hull on, it will turn soggy pretty fast. Raspberries simply disintegrate. But I have never really received truly dirty berries in the first place. If I am going to cook them, I wash them without worrying because it becomes irrelevant.
I do want to say that one thing I learned is that 99% of food-borne illness is caused by human error at the level of packaging or preparation. Meaning hygenic or cleanliness issues, or failing to maintain proper temperatures in storage, etc.
As Judith says, contaiminated soil is very rare in developed countries.
The use of pesticides is a much larger, national and even global issue that I can't really tackle because it is too huge for a simple post on a message board thread.
Our restaurant tries to get as much produce as possible from local farmers we know well, trust and value...it matters when you look the person who grew the stuff in the eye when you buy it.
Here we have to take a course on hygenic kitchen standards before you're allowed to cook for people that are not your family and friends. The serious problems regarding food-borne illnesses come from dairy products, eggs and low ph preserves, the rest is pretty safe if you use loads of fresh running water as Stella sais! I don't have to worry about chemicals as we grow almost everything we cook and our farm is organic, so... And of course (biologically) conaminated soil is very very very rare in developed countries (uless you grow your mushrooms directly on manure, I guess ).
"People who enjoy eating sausage and obeying the law should not watch either being made"
So I'll keep out of restaurant kitchens.
I know that when I wash raspberries and mushrooms, even ever so gently, I am damaging them. But I can't help myself. If the berries look beautiful in restaurants, they've probably not been washed.
I know that when I wash raspberries and mushrooms, even ever so gently, I am damaging them.
I totally skip "washing" when it comes to raspberries (I learned that one the hard way, by practically destroying a pint) but I rinse off the top (caps) of mushrooms and then just wipe the underneath (stems). I think the stem part is most absorbent so if you keep the water out of that area, you should be ok.
Posts: 871 | Location: New York City | Registered: 28 May 2003
Yeppers, I agree with not washing raspberries...they are clean from the berry patch, so no need to wash them. The only thing I do when I pick rapsberries is check inside each one for those eensy-teensy, teeny-weeny little green worms that make them their home!
Funny thing, my grandmother canned, froze and made jam and raspberry cream pie from ga-zillions of pounds of fresh raspberries each summer, and I don't think it's too likely that she looked in every single one of them before she made raspberry pie!
“Even if you've been fishing for 3 hours and haven't gotten anything except poison ivy and sunburn, you're still better off than the worm.” ~ Unknown Brenda
If mushrooms are grown on manure they will taste of manure, not of murhsoom. I do not know in the us, here in Italy cultivated mushrooms are grown on humus.
There is a report today from the federal government in Canada stating that in a recent test more than 20 % of the produce they checked contained traces of pesticides.
Slow Travel Talk 
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