On 4/8/2018 at 12:09 AM, DiggingDogFarm said:
I haven't been able to find where high-temperature sanitizing has been tested—wish I could, but solution sanitizing certainly has.
I don't think a board can be used without scoring it in some way—minor or major.
Boiled vinegar may be one of the best all-around sanitizers for poly boards.
"The FDA code and health departments across the United States have emphasized the use of sanitizing chemicals as the critical point for making food contact surfaces safe. These data show that this assumption is not always accurate. Wiping the surface with a clean cloth soaked in vinegar appears to be a very effective sanitizer, based on the data. Simply rinsing and scrubbing a dirty surface with flowing water seems to be more effective than cleaning and sanitizing food contact surfaces with a cloth dipped in a quaternary ammonium compound solution. It is also known that when a quaternary ammonium compound solution becomes dirty in an open bucket into which dirty cloths are dipped, the solution becomes susceptible to degradation by filth, dirt, and other debris. As a result, the solution does not remain at its beginning strength over a period of 2 hours that the solution is used. The quaternary ammonium compound solution used in this experiment was dispensed from a squirt bottle to maintain its effectiveness and prevent degradation."
Source: THE MICROBIOLOGY OF CLEANING AND SANITIZING A CUTTING BOARD by O. Peter Snyder, Jr., Ph.D.
High temperature sanitizing works the same way as pasteurization and sterilization. It's the simplest to understand sanitization, because temperature/time/death curves for all pathogens are well known. I've never heard of a health department not acknowledging it. It doesn't come up so often, because for the method to be practical you need a heat-sanitizing dishwasher. Water from the tap isn't hot enough, and if it were, it would do the same things to the dishwashers' hands that it does to the bacteria.
That quotation about dipping a cloth in quaternary ammonium is a bit of a straw-man argument. It's basically saying that if you use those sanitizers exactly the way the manufacturers tell you not too, they won't work well. There are mountains of legitimate research on sanitizers. Beware of treating a single, non-peer reviewed article as gospel. Vinegar has many shortcomings. It's fairly weak against lysteria and e.coli. It's useless against most viruses (quats are ineffective against norovirus, which is the one real strike I see against them). Vinegar is absolutely more effective than not using vinegar, so if you're looking for a bit of additional insurance, there's no harm. Just don't overestimate it.
