Salmonella bacteria is killed instantly at 165°F. Cooking small chopped or sliced pieces of meat is hard to do wrong because the surface area to volume ratio is high enough that they will be sterilized even before they start to appear cooked. Make your slices less than 1⁄2 inch thick and cook them until they start to turn golden brown. As long as the business ends of your utensils are in contact with the food as it cooks they will be sterilized along with it.
Assuming that you already know how to wash things in general, you don’t need to do it any differently. Normal washing is good enough because bacteria can’t grow without a source of nutrients and moisture, and you need to ingest a fairly substantial amount of bacteria in order to get sick.
We should add that soapy water does not kill the bacteria, but rather makes it impossible for them to adhere to anything, so they get washed down the drain.
Washing bacteria down the drain is certainly the primary purpose for using soap, by far, but surfactants like soap also kill a few bacteria by lysis (disruption of the cell membrane, causing the cells to rapidly swell with water and burst). In practice, this is so minor it’s not worth paying attention to: bacteria have a surrounding cell wall made of a sugar-protein polymer that resists surfactants (among other things), dramatically slowing down the process to the point that it’s not practical to make use of it.
(Some bacteria are more vulnerable to surfactant lysis than others. Gram-negative bacteria have a much thinner cell wall, which is itself surrounded by a second, more exposed membrane. But gram-positive bacteria have a thick wall with nothing particularly vulnerable on the outside, and even with gram-negative bacteria the scope of the effect is minor.)
In practice, the big benefit of soap is (#1) washing away oils, especially skin oils, and (#2) dissolving the biofilms produced by the bacteria to anchor themselves to each other and to biological surfaces (like skin and wooden cutting boards). Killing the bacteria directly with soap is a distant third priority.
For handwashing, hot water is in a similar boat: even the hottest water your hands can stand is merely enough to speed up surfactant action, not to kill bacteria directly. For cleaning inanimate surfaces, sufficiently hot water is quite effective at killing bacteria, but most people’s hot water only goes up to 135°F or thereabouts, which is not scaldingly hot enough to do the job instantly.
For directly killing bacteria via non-heat means, alcohol and bleach are both far more effective than soap. Alcohol very rapidly strips off the cell wall and triggers immediate lysis, while bleach acts both as a saponifier (it turns fatty acids into soap) and a strong oxidizer (directly attacking the chemical structure of the cell wall and membrane, ripping it apart like a rapid-action biological parallel to rusting iron).
Fun trivia: your hand feels slippery or “bleachy” after handling bleach (or any reasonably strong base) because the outermost layer of your skin has been converted into soap.
I formulated this hypothesis on my own, but I have not seen evidence to back this up. I think a misunderstanding of this process has lead to the profusion of anti-bacterial soaps, which may be breeding hard-to-kill bacteria.
Those who are concerned may be interested to know that Ivory Liquid Hand Soap (and, in all the stores I’ve visited lately, no other) is a brand of liquid soap which contains no antibacterial ingredients.
Furthermore, it at least used to have a slogan like “so gentle you can even use it on your face” — and it does not have the warning “keep out of eyes” that, as far as I know, all antibacterial soaps have — and I do in fact use it as a face and body wash.
This is true, but it probably helps to state explicitly that a) the even for small pieces of meat the inside might not be at 165 F even if the outside is (so make sure that it is hot for a fair bit of time) b) This is more of an issue for larger pieces of meat (luminosity’s comment below is relevant).
There’s a related issue: if the meat is raw and frozen, life will be much easier if you defrost it before cooking it. Weird things can happen if you try to directly cook large bits of frozen meat. Generally it won’t result in health problems, but it does make stuff more likely to be burned in part or simply not taste good.
However, I find it much easier to slice meat for stir-frying which is still partially frozen. (This also speeds the thawing process.) Probably if you use a cleaver or other heavy, extremely sharp type of instrument, no prior thawing would be necessary; but I don’t trust myself with those.
Salmonella bacteria is killed instantly at 165°F. Cooking small chopped or sliced pieces of meat is hard to do wrong because the surface area to volume ratio is high enough that they will be sterilized even before they start to appear cooked. Make your slices less than 1⁄2 inch thick and cook them until they start to turn golden brown. As long as the business ends of your utensils are in contact with the food as it cooks they will be sterilized along with it.
Assuming that you already know how to wash things in general, you don’t need to do it any differently. Normal washing is good enough because bacteria can’t grow without a source of nutrients and moisture, and you need to ingest a fairly substantial amount of bacteria in order to get sick.
We should add that soapy water does not kill the bacteria, but rather makes it impossible for them to adhere to anything, so they get washed down the drain.
Washing bacteria down the drain is certainly the primary purpose for using soap, by far, but surfactants like soap also kill a few bacteria by lysis (disruption of the cell membrane, causing the cells to rapidly swell with water and burst). In practice, this is so minor it’s not worth paying attention to: bacteria have a surrounding cell wall made of a sugar-protein polymer that resists surfactants (among other things), dramatically slowing down the process to the point that it’s not practical to make use of it.
(Some bacteria are more vulnerable to surfactant lysis than others. Gram-negative bacteria have a much thinner cell wall, which is itself surrounded by a second, more exposed membrane. But gram-positive bacteria have a thick wall with nothing particularly vulnerable on the outside, and even with gram-negative bacteria the scope of the effect is minor.)
In practice, the big benefit of soap is (#1) washing away oils, especially skin oils, and (#2) dissolving the biofilms produced by the bacteria to anchor themselves to each other and to biological surfaces (like skin and wooden cutting boards). Killing the bacteria directly with soap is a distant third priority.
For handwashing, hot water is in a similar boat: even the hottest water your hands can stand is merely enough to speed up surfactant action, not to kill bacteria directly. For cleaning inanimate surfaces, sufficiently hot water is quite effective at killing bacteria, but most people’s hot water only goes up to 135°F or thereabouts, which is not scaldingly hot enough to do the job instantly.
For directly killing bacteria via non-heat means, alcohol and bleach are both far more effective than soap. Alcohol very rapidly strips off the cell wall and triggers immediate lysis, while bleach acts both as a saponifier (it turns fatty acids into soap) and a strong oxidizer (directly attacking the chemical structure of the cell wall and membrane, ripping it apart like a rapid-action biological parallel to rusting iron).
Fun trivia: your hand feels slippery or “bleachy” after handling bleach (or any reasonably strong base) because the outermost layer of your skin has been converted into soap.
I formulated this hypothesis on my own, but I have not seen evidence to back this up. I think a misunderstanding of this process has lead to the profusion of anti-bacterial soaps, which may be breeding hard-to-kill bacteria.
Those who are concerned may be interested to know that Ivory Liquid Hand Soap (and, in all the stores I’ve visited lately, no other) is a brand of liquid soap which contains no antibacterial ingredients.
Furthermore, it at least used to have a slogan like “so gentle you can even use it on your face” — and it does not have the warning “keep out of eyes” that, as far as I know, all antibacterial soaps have — and I do in fact use it as a face and body wash.
This is true, but it probably helps to state explicitly that a) the even for small pieces of meat the inside might not be at 165 F even if the outside is (so make sure that it is hot for a fair bit of time) b) This is more of an issue for larger pieces of meat (luminosity’s comment below is relevant).
There’s a related issue: if the meat is raw and frozen, life will be much easier if you defrost it before cooking it. Weird things can happen if you try to directly cook large bits of frozen meat. Generally it won’t result in health problems, but it does make stuff more likely to be burned in part or simply not taste good.
However, I find it much easier to slice meat for stir-frying which is still partially frozen. (This also speeds the thawing process.) Probably if you use a cleaver or other heavy, extremely sharp type of instrument, no prior thawing would be necessary; but I don’t trust myself with those.