Safety and Hygiene (HACCP)
Safety and Hygiene (HACCP) tests whether you can run a food safety system, not just recite temperatures. Questions cover the seven HACCP principles, the difference between a control point and a critical control point, critical limits and monitoring records, personal and kitchen hygiene, allergen control and the common accident risks of a professional kitchen.
The seven principles
- Analyse hazards: biological, chemical, physical and allergenic.
- Determine CCPs: steps where control is essential, such as cooking, cooling, hot holding and chilling.
- Set critical limits, for example a 75 °C core or a 5 °C maximum storage temperature.
- Monitor with a calibrated probe, naming who checks and when.
- Define corrective action: re-cook, re-chill, relabel or discard.
- Verify through calibration, audits, swabs and review of records.
- Document procedures, monitoring records and training.
Temperatures and times that are examined
- Danger zone: 5–63 °C.
- Chilled storage at or below 5 °C; fish at 0–2 °C on drained ice; freezer at −18 °C or colder.
- Hot holding at or above 63 °C; reheating to at least 74 °C core.
- Cooking: poultry 74–75 °C, minced meat 71 °C, whole muscle to the customer's requested doneness.
- Cooling: 63 °C down to 10 °C within two hours, then 10 °C down to 3 °C within a further four hours.
Hygiene, allergens and accidents
- Handwashing, no jewellery, clean uniform, and exclusion of staff with vomiting or diarrhoea.
- Colour-coded boards, separate raw and cooked zones, probe cleaned and disinfected between uses.
- The 14 EU declarable allergens must be labelled and protected from cross-contact with separate scoops and sealed containers.
- Knife, burn, slip, gas and fire risks: fire blanket and CO2 for electrical or oil fires, never water on hot oil.
Worked example
A 20 L batch of beef stew for cook-chill. CCP1 is cooking: core at least 75 °C for two minutes, probed in the thickest piece. CCP2 is cooling: decant into five shallow 4 L trays and blast-chill to 10 °C within 90 minutes, recording temperatures. Store at 3 °C or below for a maximum of three days, labelled, then regenerate to 75 °C. If the blast chiller fails and the stew sits at 25 °C for three hours, the corrective action is discard, because safety cannot be proven; record the incident and investigate.
Traps that cost marks
- Treating the freezer as a step that kills bacteria.
- Completing monitoring records retrospectively at the end of the week.
- Writing that the chef checks, without a named monitor and a frequency.
- Assuming allergens mean only nuts.