Sausage with mould leads to €6,000 penalty

A mouldy batter sausage led to fines totalling €6,000 for an Enniscorthy takeaway as the HSE brought a prosecution to the District Court last Wednesday. Defendant Kenan Dzhavidov, trading as Denis's Kebab House of Castle Hill, was not present for the proceedings. Evidence was given by his customers Ray Healy and Suzanne Ryan of 11 Ashgrove in The Paddock. Healy told the court how he ordered a takeaway for home delivery on January 6 last year. Ms. Ryan described how she applied salt, vinegar and red sauce to the batter sausage which she began to eat while watching television. She applied more condiments after noticing that the sausage did not taste as normal but this had no effect and she then saw a hairy black mould. She threw the sausage on the floor and vomited. Her partner preserved the sausage in the fridge. When there was no satisfactory explanation or apology from the takeaway the following day, he put it in the freezer and notified the health service. In court, environmental health officer Avril Beaumont confirmed that the sausage was sent for analysis at a laboratory in Cork. The lab test suggested that the black mould was aspergillus and that it was on the food before cooking. The incident prompted Ms. Beaumont to pay a call to the premises in Castle Hill on January 17 last year. She discovered that batter sausages were being par-cooked and then cooled overnight. She reckoned that this was poor procedure and that that anything left longer than two and a half hours should either be chilled or thrown out, for fear that mould could form. She also noted that solid fat was being stored in the potentially unhygienic toilet. Judge Gerard Haughton felt that the offences described were serious, the more so as the accused did not attend court. For serving unfit food, he recorded a €2,000 fine. Similar penalties were imposed for the unsafe method of preparing the batter sausages and for inappropriate storage of the fat. Witness expenses of €100 were awarded and Dzhavidov was further ordered to meet the HSE's legal costs. Source: http://www.independent.ie