How To NOT Kill Anyone With Your Bird

so here's how to cook a Thanksgiving dinner and be reasonably assured that you're not gonna kill anybody tip number one believe it or not is don't wash your turkey or really any meat says who says dr. Francisco Diaz Gonzalez director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia not chicken not turkey you should not attempt to wash it it's not gonna help you God he's gonna make things worse this is a classic lesser of two evils calculation sure there's probably some bacteria on the surface of the meat but that's the lesser evil because you're gonna cook the thing and unless you really screw this up anything on the surface of that meat is gonna be toast the greater evil is that you might splash those bugs around your kitchen while you're trying to wash them off they can splash on the counter and they'll certainly splash in your sink you know the same sink where you wash your hands and your vegetables not only that but by running water on top of a turkey carcass you're going to be creating airborne contamination that could actually get into you that's micro aerosols that are produced when if you're if you're splashing water on top of the the turkey so turkey should be handled really as a biohazard material almost because you can have it Salmonella you can have Campylobacter organisms let's back up a second talk about why poultry poses such a hazard in the kitchen compared to say beef and pork with those other meats you pretty much just have to make sure that you've blasted the surface if the inside is pink you're gonna be just fine assuming that you don't live in a country where beef and pork tapeworms are a big thing but here in the United States Canada Western Europe the bugs we mostly have to worry about occur in the animals digestive system and they can get on the meat in the slaughterhouse as long as you cook the exterior you kill them you're fine but research shows that poultry is more likely to have some pathogens inside the meat dr. Diaz says they might get there via the animal's lymphatic system but it could also just be a function of the size and shape of the birds we eat their little unlike a cow so with a little thing the digestive system that's being removed at the slaughterhouse is simply much closer to the meat that we're actually going to eat also when you're cooking a whole turkey you have to assume that the interior part is contaminate you need to make sure that the heat penetrates efficiently to expose even the most interior parts of the turkey 265 so he's talking about the birds cavity right rarely when you eat a cow do you have to deal with the part of the cow that was right up against its digestive system but when you cook a bird you do this invites the question is stuffing a turkey inherently dangerous to my surprise dr. Diaz says he stuffs but he puts a thermometer deep into the center of the stuffing and he doesn't stop cooking until it reads 165 Fahrenheit 74 Celsius at that temperature everything will be dead instantly it simply doesn't matter what was in the cavity or whether the stuffing touched the skin of the bird on the way in none of that matters as long as you had 165 it's all moot now even if you hit that temperature it's still not uncommon to find some pink on the inside of the bird should that make you worried we'll get to that right after I briefly thank the sponsor of this video hello fresh America's number one meal kit get nine meals for free right now at hellofresh comm by using my code Adam or goosey a nine well I am a pretty practiced home cook I still find I really enjoy cooking hellofresh meals even for dishes that I'm known to cook unassisted with a step-by-step instructions and pre-measured ingredients it kind of gives me the same satisfaction that I would get from building a model airplane except you get to eat it at the end and if you're not as confident in the kitchen hellofresh is a great set of training wheels to have there's tons of menu options to choose from calorie smart vegetarian even craft burgers and it's flexible you can change up your meal plan you can change up your delivery days and you can easily skip a week when you need to if say you're gonna be out of town for Thanksgiving and hella fresh is now from 566 per serving get started with hellofresh with nine free meals that's 90 dollars off your first month of hellofresh including shipping go to hello fresh comm and enter my code Adam or goosey a nine that's all down in the description okay so the deepest parts of your turkey have hit 165 but once you start carving and you get in there you find some still pink tissues of various kinds should you be worried well the color is not an indication of whether it's fully cooked or not because there could other factors that may lead to a lighter or a Koller some examples that the United States Department of Agriculture points out some gases in your oven can react with the hemoglobin in meat and create a pink color there's also nitrites and nitrates preservatives often used in animal feed they can get into the animal's Anatomy and change the color of the meat bones do weird things to color the water and iron and fat in meat can do weird things to color but the clear consensus among food safety experts is that temperature is the most reliable thing to go by color is just what we had to go by in the days before thermometers you hit 165 you're gonna be fine but take multiple readings around the bird a turkey is a big thing there can be lots of microclimates in there okay now brining some people are under the impression that if you use a brine you don't have to be so worried about pathogens no I don't think you can you can rely on brain to control microbial growth I mean of course salt does kill microorganisms but only if there's enough salt if really highly concentrated salt solution then they would inhibit but that that would be way too salty if you're gonna do the brining you still need to follow the same directions that you need to keep the the turkey always if it is uncooked you need to keep it at the very minimum at the refrigeration temperature so yeah if you want to be careful you got to do your brining in the refrigerator which can be tricky with something as big as a turkey this is one of many reasons why I don't like brining a turkey okay say you've cooked the turkey you've rested the turkey now how long can it sit out in the kitchen at room temperature while people mill in and out helping themselves the recommendation is no more than two hours and what do you do when 2 hours is up reheat it you put it back in the either in the oven or microwave reheat it or put it in the fridge and how long can it stay in the fridge for cooked foods no more than four days move it over to the freezer and dr. Diaz says it's safe and definitely the main thing about freezing is that it stops all microbial growth completely so it's not gonna spoil at least from the microbiological point of view from a culinary perspective I think that frozen cooked meat tends to taste a little bit drab and off after a few weeks but that has nothing to do with safety now what about the other stuff that we tend to leave out on the counter at Thanksgiving the sweets the pies is that safe that depends on the pie and one of the major misconception is - pumpkin pie has been proven that it's is not very stable microorganisms can grow on pumpkin pie and it makes sense right because pumpkin pie is a custard pie it's mostly eggs and cream to things that can come with microorganisms pumpkin pie is actually a historically notable case of the American baking industry engaging in self-regulation they found that they could create a more shelf staple pie by baking the custard to an interior temperature of a hundred and eighty Fahrenheit in a home baking context that would be pretty overcooked your pie would crack it would squeeze out water anyway custard pies like pumpkin you should leave in the fridge fruit pies and cookies and things like that you're pretty safe to leave out on the counter because they have so much sugar in them sugar is hydrophilic it sucks in all the water around bacteria and other organisms need water to grow so if you reduce the amount of water available for the organisms bacteria are not gonna grow they're gonna lose they're gonna be inhibited what sugar does is basically it's because it's dissolving sugar inhibits microbial growth so most sweets you're good to leave that on the counter for at least a day lastly I want to speak to the folks in Europe and some other parts of the world who are no doubt thinking right now oh you Americans you're so paranoid always worried about food safety we raw pork on crackers or whatever aren't we sophisticated so keep in mind that different countries have different food supplies I have no idea what your country's deal is but I do know for sure that people get sick from meat in the United States all the time don't believe me go do some searching on Knorr that's the National outbreak reporting system one of the things that dr. Diaz likes to point out is that here in the States we have a really robust system for reporting and documenting foodborne illness you might think that this never happens in your country merely because you don't have anything like Knorr so you don't know about it you know I don't live my life in fear of these things I eat super rare meat and really runny eggs and raw cookie dough and if that means that like once a decade I'm gonna have to spend 12 to 36 hours on all fours in my bathroom so be it we make choices in life but this is Thanksgiving we're talking about and I'm not just cooking for myself I'm cooking for little kids and old people people who are more likely to get sick from contaminated meat and they're more likely to die when it happens to them so I figure if we're ever gonna play it safe now is the time

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 564,567

Rating: 4.9106641 out of 5

Keywords: should you wash your meat, should you wash meat before cooking, should you wash your meat before cooking, should you wash your turkey, should you wash your chicken before cooking it, should you wash your chicken before you eat it, should i wash meat before cooking, should i wash my meat, should I wash meat, cooking, chicken, washing chicken, food safety, meat, cdc, bacteria, food, steak, salmonella, wash, turkey safety, turkey safe, turkey safe zone, turkey safety video

Id: 6BP6LRRXmXc

Length: 9min 3sec (543 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 11 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Leon_the_loathed]

Or ya know you can just clean up afterwards?

Then again I always thought that I was the only one who licks every surface in my kitchen on a monthly basis while never cleaning.

[u/TheMindzai]

Wait, people out there are washing their meat? Wtf would compel people to wash meat? What purpose would that serve?

[u/d3vrandom]

this is a first world thing. in pakistan the way the chicken is slaughtered it ends up being coated in a faeces and blood from other chickens so you kinda have to wash it. you could cook it without washing it but it'll taste like shit.

[u/knowerofexpatthings]

Who the fuck is washing meat?

[u/fatboyiv]

Also clean the sink after

[u/Asog88]

I thought people wash them because dirty people and chemicals have touched it in its way to your counter

[u/KrystalAri]

No one is 'washing' their chicken. They are rinsing it off with water. I do not enjoy the little feathers and extra pieces of fat on my chicken.

[u/VloekenenVentileren]

Belgium here. Nobody washed their chicken. Interestingly, we don't refrigerate our eggs either.

[u/BigTnT]

We rinse it sometimes to dry out the surface better. We think it tastes better if you get the goo it's packed with off. Not really a hygiene thing more of a the packing solution is slimy enough to be annoying to clean off with just paper towel but rinses really easily.

That being said we don't really rinse it anymore b/c we had kids.