ITT: people who undercook their chicken think that washing is what’s saving them when in reality, washing your chicken only enables a host of cross-contamination issues. Congratulations for turning your sink into a biohazard facility.
Wait, you don’t eat chicken medium rare?
If you hold your chicken for ten minutes at temperature, you can cook it medium rare and pink. https://blog.thermoworks.com/chicken-internal-temps-everything-you-need-to-know/
Eww. Also tough so also eww.
Red meat can be eaten rare, because even if the inside is raw, it’s not usually contaminated by anything dangerous, while chicken meat has to be throughly cooked because it’s the opposite… So washing the outside is useless.
Only if it’s a slab of meat, like a steak. Ground meat mixes up all those contaminants, so unless you grind it yourself from a slab with the outsides cut off (still iffy), cook your ground meat thoroughly (medium well is probably enough). You can get away with a sear on pretty fresh steak though.
And then there are the Germans, eating raw ground beef on a bun.
It seems, you can get away with raw meat, if you buy it freshly ground from the butcher.On a bun? That’s Mett and it’s pork. Yes, ground raw pork. It’s quite tasty. Sprinkle of onion usually.
Yeah, as long as the equipment is sterile, and the edges with the bacteria are removed. That’s not happening at your local grocery store.
I buy my filet américain at my local grocery store. It is made of a beef/pork mix (the fancier the more beef) and usually has an expiry date of T+2 days thanks to the added preservatives.
Industrially processing raw meat is perfectly doable, much to the Americans’ utter disbelief. Belgium has entire specialized industrial supply chains for the massive local demand of raw ground meat bread spread.
Certainly, it’s just a lot more work than the less sanitary “chuck the extra meat into the grinder” method we use here.
I’d love to try that raw beef spread BTW. I’ve had beef sashimi before, and it was great.
Rinsing and scrubbing will spread micro droplets a lot further than your sink.
This is why I don’t clean the dishes in my sink… Not trying to spread any micro droplets.
i thought it said “than you sink” and that you were making a German coastguard joke
vat?
Are you sinking about?
So where I live, frozen chicken is cut on a wooden chopping board overlaid with pieces of the carton it came it. Without washing you’ll end up with random bits of cardboard, wood, fish fins and possibly sand.
makes chicken fish fins and sand in it
Are you the little mermaid?
Unda da sea!
This is reasonable time to wash your chicken and also likely where this habit comes from. Before the age of factory farming and the advent of reliable home refrigeration a lot of meat was improperly stored before and after selling.
Washing your produce was likely a good defense mechanism to wash away actual dirt, grime and bugs that may have adhered to it. Nowadays it’s largely unnecessary unless you’re still living in a place where butchering and processing techniques may not be of the greatest quality.
If your meat is visibly dirty then sure, go ahead and rinse it, don’t be an idiot and eat wood. This conversation is people buying it from the grocery though.
Only meat I routinely wash is porkchops. Slimiest stuff on the market
What kind of idiot doesn’t wash their food after getting it from the store
completely agree. this is why i make sure to thoroughly wash my ice cream with soap and water before eating it.
Yes clearly we are talking about highly processed packaged foods /s
Make sure to wash your sugar, too. Cotton candy, especially!
Yeah, you never know where that’s been…
It’s been in my tea, hasn’t it?
You… I like you. 😀
It’s recommended you DON’T wash your chicken because that just throws bacteria around your kitchen.
Cook it thorougly. Use a meat thermometer to be sure and you’ll be fine.
I believe that’s a myth. If you cook thoroughly, you don’t need to worry about bacteria. Why would it matter if its being moved around then?
There sure are plenty of ‘under no circumstances’ articles and testimonials parroting each other.Washing removes the gooey protein film on the surface, which otherwise ends up cooking into a egg-white-like membrane.
You can also wipe it with a paper towel to accomplish the same.
You should, at the very least, always dry your chicken to allow the surface to brown properly. Otherwise you end up with the hospital patient pale white.- reading around, it’s spreading the bacteria from the chicken to the environment thats the problem, so I was wrong there. Paper towel it is from now on.
It’s recommended you DON’T wash your chicken because that just throws bacteria around your kitchen.
I believe that’s a myth. If you cook thoroughly, you don’t need to worry about bacteria. Why would it matter if its being moved around then?
I think they mean that if you wash the chicken before cooking you might propel the not-yet-dead bacteria around your kitchen, which is worse than putting it all in the oven together to kill it.
Yep, you nailed it in your edit. We do exactly that - dry it off with a few paper towels, then roast. As long as you can resist devouring the paper towels or dragging them all over the house (I’m looking at my sleeping dogs as I type this), it’s safe.
I remember hearing the same thing.
No you don’t.
My mom has always made me “wash chicken,” which would just be running it under water. Just chicken, nothing else.
I used to do it out of habit, but laziness seems to have worked in my favor this time.
Unwashed Chicken is totally safe if you do this one amazing trick.
Cook it properly.
If you don’t know how to do that by sight or touch then buy yourself a instant read thermometer.
Do people wash pork chops? steaks? hamburgers?
People of West Indian descent often wash meat like pork and beef with a vinegar solution, but not ground meat
Washed chicken won’t be any safer if it’s undercooked, salmonella isn’t a surface only danger.
Washed chicken is a stupid concept, I was including the unwashed part because that is the default state of uncooked chicken.
Unless you accidentally drop a chicken on the floor and don’t want to waste it, there isn’t a reason to wash it.
And by washing it you might spread the salmonella all over the place.
As across the pond dweller, I am reading this and going “u wot m8?”
Nobody tell him about restaurant kitchens washing their chicken in bleach to remove the smell of freezer burn…
So that’s why I can’t get my chicken to taste restaurant quality!
Apparently washing your chicken was an old practice to “rinse the germs off”. In reality it just sprays germs everywhere. I can’t believe anyone thought it was a good idea.
I think it’s common where meat is sold in open-air markets. I read an article about the practice last year.
In the days before plastic packaging?
Those things still exist. Heck they might come back in the US once food prices rise and the FDA is disbanded.
It’s a leftover practice from days when standards were lower. Just like cooking pork to 165, it’s not necessary anymore, but habits die hard
Not washing your chicken with vinegar gives it a dirty taste. Don’t @ me.
Bro just discovered marinade, thinks it’s “washing”. My steaks taste better if I “wash” them with lemon juice
I was going to mention not washing your chicken, but the comments nail it. Don’t wash your chicken, the bacteria just spreads around your kitchen.
I remember watching an interview with some chef once. They were asked what common things they would see when they’re at someone’s house that would keep them from eating, just out of fear. Washing raw chicken in the sink was the instant answer. It splashes everywhere and is very likely to contaminate half your kitchen.
That’s disgusting.
That’s why I bring my raw chicken to the bathtub. The curtains keep it contained, and it gives me something to do while I shower.
I’m confused what they think they’re washing off. If you don’t believe the cooking kills the germs then you’re not cooking it right (or are confused). If you think it’s something that won’t come off with cooking like dirt or dust, then, ew, why are you getting chicken from somewhere that gets it covered in dirt or dust?
Sometimes it’s the bacteria that kills you sometimes it’s the poop of the bacteria that kills you. The latter won’t matter if you cook it well or not. But yeah generally it’s useless to wash chicken.
I’m confused what they think they’re washing off.
A LOT of kitchen practices in families are passed-down traditions, with a lot of people not really knowing why they do the things they do.
My Filipino family-in-law washes their cuts of meat, which yeah is entirely unnecessary and I always wondered why they do it, then I traveled to the Philippines and saw the town where they lived, and most of the local butchers hang fresh cuts of meat up on hooks, uncovered, right next to busy roads and sidewalks.
I genuinely don’t know how everyone there hasn’t died of acute food poisoning from the unrefrigerated meats in high heat and humidity, but they at least like to wash off the road grime and dust.
It can also help tenderize the meat (via vinegar or lemon/lime); I tend to find that, when “nondeveloped” countries talk about washing their meat, it means in a vinegar/citrus solution while “developed” countries quite literally mean just plain water.
I don’t know what this text is going on about. People don’t wash the ‘white shit’ off chicken. Some people think that washing chicken (or poultry in general) reduces the chance of cross contamination due to salmonella. In reality it makes it more likely for cross contamination because it splatters all around your sink and surrounding areas.
It also doesn’t make it taste bland. It’s just useless.
My guess is that Anon made an assumption about what they were attempting to do while washing it off and that night didn’t put a lot of effort into the cooking and also expected it to taste bad.
Butcher pubes
People who consume a lot of floor chickens
I never wash my meats, that would cast the external microbes around the kitchen. Instead, I blanch them in boiling water for a few minutes. It’s kinda like sous vide, but faster. It’s also fine if you forget it in the water for a bit, the meat will only get cleaner! Toss some broccoli into the water for full meal prep with minimal cleanup
Out of all the disturbing comments in this thread, this one gets to me the most, especially saying it’s like a sous vide.
I love cooking my chicken in a sous vide, but you do it low and slow, 145 degrees for about 2 and a half hours.
Excellent article on it here: https://www.seriouseats.com/the-food-lab-complete-guide-to-sous-vide-chicken-breast
If you have one of these machines, I highly recommend trying it this way. Give it a quick sear in some cast iron after.
I tried sous vide baths but the ziplocks kept expanding and leaking, so I improvised. My son, trying to be helpful, kept spilling the warm hanger steak water on our dog, who didn’t mind at all but did manage to build a habit of tripping him on his way to the sink like a chihuahua-shaped guided trip cord. Even after she broke 3 of her legs in a botched attempt, looking like a potato on weighted stilts, the habit persisted. Then we moved on to blanching and my wife had to grind the handles off of our cast iron pot to prevent the kid from trying to move it. It was headache after compromise after headache, but my wife and I tolerated it for the perfect steaks. Just try to tell me they don’t look appetizing
What do you think happens to the microbes when you put the chicken in the pan or in the oven?
Do you also blanche your steaks?
You’re saying doing that makes the meat cleaner but you’re also sending broccoli in that dirty water?
All you’re doing is taking the flavor out of your chicken and making a broth out of good meat, that’s ridiculous!
(cough cough) Note their name - “gullible”
They got me too until I read their next comment. Haha
The microbes are dead because I blanched them for 5 minutes, like the internet said to do
I do not think I have ever washed any chicken I have prepared, EVER
The only time I wash chicken is after cooking it, and when I drop it on the floor and thing “eh, I can still eat this”
me neither (ive never prepared any chicken)
me neither (ive never washed any thing)
Me neither (ive never eaten any thing)
Me neither (I’ve never)
Me
