Picking Up Salt with Your Fingers: How Unhygienic Is It?
How do you use salt in the kitchen, or at the table? Do you have a neat salt shaker, or perhaps a grinder for salt chunks, or one of those handy open dishes or bowls that you keep picking salt from with your fingers? If you answered ‘yes’ to the last one, you’d better keep reading…
Because that salt dish is (also) prominently displayed on my kitchen counter, and it moves with us to the dining table when we sit down to eat. There’s a little spoon in it, too. The purpose of that spoon is obviously to prevent people from rummaging around in the salt with their fingers – as you may have read in other articles, I’m quite disgusted by things. But does everyone stick to that? Well, even I don’t always. So the question is: is it bad to rummage around in the salt dish with your fingers?
Do as Jamie Does
What’s nice about taking a pinch of salt with your fingers instead of shaking it out of a shaker is that you have a better idea of how much salt it actually is. You can generally distribute it over the pan or dish better with your fingers, which is why you always see Jamie Oliver sprinkling salt from a fairly great height. But can you keep rummaging around in the salt with the same fingers you use to handle ingredients?
Cross-Contamination
A 2022 study in Food Control showed the following: volunteers first touched raw chicken contaminated with Salmonella and Listeria bacteria, and then, without washing their hands first, touched salt to season lettuce leaves. Both types of bacteria were subsequently found on the lettuce leaves, clearly showing that the salt acted as a vehicle for cross-contamination. Even if the bacteria might be killed by heating and cooking the chicken, they would still be present on the lettuce.
Wash for 20 Seconds
Another possibility, says food safety specialist Carla Schwan, is that you contaminate the dish itself with unwashed hands. If you touch that dish in the same place the next time, you could potentially transfer bacteria that have remained there to something else you touch, causing cross-contamination all over again. According to her, while cooking, especially after touching raw fish or raw meat, you should wash your hands in warm water for at least 20 seconds.
Keep It Clean
Her colleague Kimberly Baker agrees. When you consider everything you touch in the kitchen, including your phone, doorknobs, handles, and so on, all the dirt and bacteria on them could also end up in your food. So the advice remains to wash your hands, and to wash that salt dish regularly and dry it thoroughly. And one more tip from Schwan: scoop a very small amount of salt into a separate dish when you start cooking and refill it with equally small amounts as it runs out during cooking. Throw away whatever is left (hopefully nothing) at the end, and wash that ‘helper’ dish or put it in the dishwasher.
Source: Epicurious
Also read:
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- How to properly clean a knife block
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