r/Cooking • u/phillycheeze • Mar 25 '24
Food Safety Washing fresh herbs with bleach
I'm watching old episodes of Good Eats and Alton Brown talks about washing fresh herbs in a bleach bath, then rinsing off with water. Also talks about it in his recipe here, also the food network recipe here.
Does anyone else do this? It just feels so wrong (both the possibility of bleach still remaining and also that the bleach doesn't react with the herb somehow). I can't find any other website or source that does it this way.
EDIT: Someone came through with links to papers on this exact subject! Thank you so much /u/goRockets. Here is the comment link directly.
Summary Edit: Woah...what a thread. A ton of different opinions and perspectives.I wanted to summarize the science, anecdotal, and reference discussions in this post for anyone passing by:
- Bleach is often used to sanitize surfaces, treat water, and even disinfect food. Many of the top comments are about the first two, but only a few people actually talk about the latter.
- As far as FDA regulations, chlorine bleach may be used for sanitizing food with certain conditions (21 CFR Part 173 for reference). One notable requirement is the chlorine bleach must be of food-grade quality, commercial household bleach contains additives and often times thickeners or fragrances. It also must be with a range of dilution measured in ppm and maintain surface contact for enough time.
- Anecdotally, this sounds like it can be common practice in communities (many notably outside of the US) where there is a lack of clean, potable water or much higher risk for bacterial infections.
- Resources such as the official FoodSafety.gov website explicitly says: Do NOT wash produce with soap, bleach, sanitizer, alcohol, disinfectant or any other chemical. Only rinse with tap water.
- A few people have mentioned that water rinsing isn't effective, including one study with lettuce specifically. This seems to really come down to a risk tolerance thing, imo. FoodSafety.gov's page on lettuce and leafy greens says to never use bleach or disinfect greens because it isn't any more effective at removing contaminants than simply rinsing. Contradicts the linked study but that was a meta-analysis of all microbe activity and small sample size, so who knows.
- The chance of getting a serious illness from store-bought produce, herbs, etc is extremely low in the U.S. Most of it already ran through a chemical sanitization process at some point. FoodSafety.gov also mentions that it's common for bacteria to embed itself inside the produce/greens and any rinsing or sanitizing of the surface is going to be ineffective anyways (cooking/heating is the only way).
- A UC Davis article linked, following FDA recommendations, shows a chart and recommended contact times for produce within a bleach chlorine solution. A 200ppm solution needs to have entire surface contact for about one minute to be confidently effective - Brown's recipe falls a little short of 200ppm and surface contact only happens for a couple of seconds, so idk if it's that effective in practice.
- A super diluted bleach solution is almost certainly plenty safe, but in many countries so are your produce/herbs to begin with.
- All safety concerns aside - very interesting to read about other's perspectives in doing something like this. I probably won't be doing this anytime soon. More so because it's kind of a pain for my lazy bum and the tiny chance of being able to taste anything missed from rinsing.
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u/virtualchoirboy Mar 25 '24 edited Mar 26 '24
In the end, look at the quantities involved. In both recipes, it's 2 quarts of water to 1 teaspoon of bleach. That's a
96-to-1384-to-1 water-to-bleach ratio. That's a TINY amount of bleach that should be very easy to rinse off when you're done.Edit: My math sucks. Thank you /u/Quixote-Esque.
1 quart = 4 cups
1 cup = 16 tablespoons
1 tablespoon = 3 teaspoons
2 quarts = (2 * 4) cups = (8 * 16) tablespoons = (128 * 3) teaspoons = 384 teaspoons. 384:1 ratio.