Unwashed hands, unsanitized equipment and other inspection issues at a Miami bakery
Along with pastelito problems, a West Miami-Dade Karla Bakery got in hot water with state inspectors for not having enough hot water Tuesday.
And one place Florida Department of Agriculture Inspectors Wenndy Ayerdis and Lourdes Chantez found lacking hot water was the employee restroom handwash sink.
The Karla Bakery at 8754 SW Bird Rd. has until Sept. 26 to get hot water out of that faucet for proper handwashing.
Inspectors don’t have the power to close an establishment but do have the ability to put Stop Use Orders on areas and equipment. Here’s some of what they found:
▪ A food service employee “touched oranges with bare hands and placed them in the orange juice machine to make juice for customers.” The oranges were washed as was the machine, which was also sanitized.
▪ Another food service employee decided to do more than one task in single use gloves: “handling money at the register and then grabbing oranges and placing them in the orange juice machine without changing gloves between tasks.”
▪ Even if you’re putting on gloves, you’re supposed to wash your hands. A food-handling employee skipped that step “after washing utensils at the ware wash sink” and before “donning gloves to serve food items from the hot unit.”
▪ In another washing and sanitizing failure, a food service area employee “did not sanitize the probe thermometer prior to measuring the internal temperature of cooked ham and cheese empanadas.” Stop Sale on the empanadas.
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▪ Food service employees “were not wearing hair restraints while engaged in open food handling.
▪ “The hot water was turned off at a small ware wash sink” in the processing area.
▪ The hot holding unit, which needed to keep foods at or above 135 degrees, measured an ambient temperature of 126 to 130 degrees. Though in-inspection repair kept the unit from getting hit with a Stop Use Order, the food inside the unit still got smacked with Stop Sales for not being warm enough.
So, into the garbage went beef pastelitos, guava and cheese pastelitos, chicken croquetas, cod croquetas, beef empanadas, Venezuelan beef empanadas and cheese tequenos.
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▪ As an example of food not stored at least six inches off the ground and food not kept safe from splash or dust, “white buckets with food were stored directly on the floor across from a small ware wash sink.”
▪ “Tongs used for serving pastries from hot unit were stored on a tray above the hot holding unit with packaged products for customer self-service.”
This story was originally published August 29, 2024 at 2:57 PM.
