RARE BURGERS

Pub’s rare venison burgers fall foul of food standards investigators

By Daniel Woolfson

- Last updated on GMT

Pub’s rare venison burgers fall foul of food standards investigators

Related tags Rare burgers Food standards agency

An Oxfordshire pub has been hit with a one-star food hygiene rating after environmental health officers deemed its rare venison burgers could not be proved safe to eat.

Officials claimed the Black Bull, Launton, had not followed new rules for serving rare meat and that its food storage facilities needed to be improved.

The pub has since started serving the burgers well-done and is awaiting a new inspection.

Tracy Solera, of the Black Bull, told the Oxford Mail: ​“They said everything else was perfect, but it is just because we have a high-risk food on the menu. We had the officer round and she said the kitchen was spotless.

“We are just having to do [the burger] well-done now to conform with them. It is one of our most popular dishes and people said ‘please do not take it off the menu’ so we wanted to keep it one.”

Insulting

The rating was ‘quite insulting’ given that she had worked in the industry for 20 years, she added.

According to reports, inspectors said that while they noted “very good structural compliance”, the pub needed to be able to demonstrate the processes it followed to ensure food safety and that some ready-to-eat food served at the pub had been stored with raw food – potentially placing items at risk of contamination.

The Food Standards Agency (FSA) recently introduced new controls for businesses serving rare burgers, including strict temperature controls, approved cooking and prep procedures and notifying local authorities that rare burgers would be served and prepped on site.

But Dr Lisa Ackerley, food safety expert at the BHA, told The Publican’s Morning Advertiser (PMA)​ she believed the FSA’s guidelines were unclear and didn’t safeguard businesses.

Back in September, the PMA​ reported these controls could be costly for pub chefs​ as the ability for kitchens to achieve a required bacterial reduction of 99.99% in rare burgers was likely to prove difficult and expensive for many to implement.

Knowledgable

One chef who declined to be named said: “Most chefs in the pub and restaurant trade are very knowledgeable about preparing safe rare burgers. We make sure to sear the steaks we use for our mince on all sides before making burgers, which ensures any potentially unsafe bugs are destroyed.”

The issue was brought further into the spotlight when it was examined by Channel 4 TV show Tricks of the Restaurant Trade.

However, the British Hospitality Association (BHA) responded​ by saying that while it recognised medium and rare burgers cooked in uncontrolled conditions may be unsafe, the concerns raised in the show focused solely on the colour of the burgers and said little about what businesses were doing to make them safe.

A poll of PMA ​readers previously revealed that 71% thought cooking and serving rare burgers was not worth the food safety hassle​.

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