Thanks in advance for the insights!
We are a small bakery, and our dough needs to be aged for several days prior to baking. We accomplish this by freezing the dough by putting the dough sheets on metal pans and loading them into rolling racks. When we take them out of the freezer and into the cooler to thaw, the metal pans sweat (get condensation) and drip onto the top of the sheet of dough below it. The dough is used within 18 hours of coming out of the freezer, and within 1 hour of being removed from the cooler.
Obviously we know that this isn't ideal, but this is also a situation in which we have 30-40 slabs of dough per rack and many, many racks we run per day - so managing this by wiping off the condensation isn't feasible.
The pans that we load them on are cleaned prior to using them, so the condensation is forming on a clean surface.
The dough is an active yeast dough (So there is competitive inhibition as far as staph growth/toxin formation). Once used on the line, it is fully baked.
Our consultant suggested doing some sort of risk assessment/justification for the condensation in this process, but he didn't have a strong micro background so he wasn't really sure how to go about it.
I don't believe that this is a true food safety risk, but I don't know how to go about proving it.
Any thoughts ? Thanks in advance!