I’ve only been hanging around here for a couple months, so I don’t know if it’s an annual ordeal, but there seems to be a lot of confusion about the safe minimum temperature to which to cook a turkey. I accepted Meathead as my personal meat savior back in 2019, so we cooked our turkey to 155 in the breast per his turkey ebook and it came out great - our best ever.
That had been our plan for weeks, but when when we brought out the turkey to cook, the Butterball label said this:
"To check for doneness, temperature on a meat thermometer should be 165°F in the breast/180°F in the thigh. However, Butterball recommends that the temperature in the breast reach 170°F for best eating experience."
After thinking about it for awhile I decided to stick with Meathead, but after seeing last night’s posts I decided some additional research was called for.
My first stop was "The Food Lab" and this chart from page 362 which the author says is from the USDA.
It emphasizes that a safe cooking temperature is a function of both the final temperature AND the time spent at that temperature. I now had two sources that I trust recommending lower temperatures than the USDA, but neither of them provided links to their source data, so I went to Google.
All I could find on USDA.org is their recommendation of a minimum of 165°F for safe turkey, and no discussions of time spent at lower temps as recommended by Lopez-Alt and Meathead, but I finally stumbled on Foodprotect.org, who I had never heard of. Here’s how they describe themselves on their home page:
"The Conference for Food Protection is a non-profit organization which originated in 1971. It was created to provide a formal process whereby members of industry, regulatory, academia, consumer, and professional organizations are afforded equal input in the development and/or modification of food safety guidance. Such guidance is incorporated into food safety laws and regulations at all levels of government throughout the United States."
This chart from http://www.foodprotect.org/issues/pa...i_018__all.pdf appears to be where Meathead and Lopez-Alt got their data.
The amount of fat in poultry affects how long it must be held at a given temp to be safe, and there are 12 charts with the times for each 1% increment of fat. I’m only showing the 12% chart here because it has the longest times, but the 6% chart shows 3.8 minutes at 150°F, which is what’s on the chart from "The Food Lab", so Lopez-Alt apparently thinks his turkeys are 6% fat. My Butterball said it was 8% fat.
So there you have it. Even if your turkey has 12% fat, keeping it at 150°F for 4.9 minutes will make it 99.9999999% safe. In addition to old wive’s tales and out-of-date cook books, the USDA insists on dumbing down everything by recommending 165°F, the temp at which food is instantly safe, and I assume Butterball’s attorneys are responsible for their recommendation being even higher.
That had been our plan for weeks, but when when we brought out the turkey to cook, the Butterball label said this:
"To check for doneness, temperature on a meat thermometer should be 165°F in the breast/180°F in the thigh. However, Butterball recommends that the temperature in the breast reach 170°F for best eating experience."
After thinking about it for awhile I decided to stick with Meathead, but after seeing last night’s posts I decided some additional research was called for.
My first stop was "The Food Lab" and this chart from page 362 which the author says is from the USDA.
It emphasizes that a safe cooking temperature is a function of both the final temperature AND the time spent at that temperature. I now had two sources that I trust recommending lower temperatures than the USDA, but neither of them provided links to their source data, so I went to Google.
All I could find on USDA.org is their recommendation of a minimum of 165°F for safe turkey, and no discussions of time spent at lower temps as recommended by Lopez-Alt and Meathead, but I finally stumbled on Foodprotect.org, who I had never heard of. Here’s how they describe themselves on their home page:
"The Conference for Food Protection is a non-profit organization which originated in 1971. It was created to provide a formal process whereby members of industry, regulatory, academia, consumer, and professional organizations are afforded equal input in the development and/or modification of food safety guidance. Such guidance is incorporated into food safety laws and regulations at all levels of government throughout the United States."
This chart from http://www.foodprotect.org/issues/pa...i_018__all.pdf appears to be where Meathead and Lopez-Alt got their data.
The amount of fat in poultry affects how long it must be held at a given temp to be safe, and there are 12 charts with the times for each 1% increment of fat. I’m only showing the 12% chart here because it has the longest times, but the 6% chart shows 3.8 minutes at 150°F, which is what’s on the chart from "The Food Lab", so Lopez-Alt apparently thinks his turkeys are 6% fat. My Butterball said it was 8% fat.
So there you have it. Even if your turkey has 12% fat, keeping it at 150°F for 4.9 minutes will make it 99.9999999% safe. In addition to old wive’s tales and out-of-date cook books, the USDA insists on dumbing down everything by recommending 165°F, the temp at which food is instantly safe, and I assume Butterball’s attorneys are responsible for their recommendation being even higher.
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