Well you opened up the proverbial Pandora's box there binarypaladin, now everyone is a chicken hater. Not me, I love those dirty little birds. May go cook one tonight !! Peace out !! 
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I don't think poultry necessarily has to be "toxic" as we're discussing here, but it's tough with the way most birds are raised in huge flocks and butchered in large fast-moving assembly lines. It only takes one chicken with problems to infect a whole flock or contaminate a packing line.
I have to say the locally raised and butchered birds I sometimes buy are really good eating, and I feel more confident they're sanitary and safe. That said, I still handle them the same as mass-produced poultry.Last edited by IowaGirl; January 30, 2019, 05:36 PM.Comment
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Not hatin em, it’s just good to know that we are informed and know how to handle the situation of chickies. I still think the road thing is the problem. Jerod said it was transportation that gets em started. So, son’t let em cross the road.Comment
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One word. "Lard!"Comment
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I luv chicken they r delicious For dirty little yard birdsComment
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Troutman Ha. I like chicken. Since I've learned to cook the whole bird pretty well, I like it a lot more. Since I stopped cooking the breast to 160ºF, and instead aim to remove from the cook at 150-155ºF, I even like breasts cooked without sous-vide. Before that, I pretty much skipped the breasts and ate only wings, legs, and thighs.
Aside from the comment about acidity, and another comment from Jerod Broussard about injections, I'm still not sure I understand why a chicken breast cannot be treated like a steak where surface contamination is the only real issue. If I sear the surface of a ribeye well enough to get a decent crust, that thing is safe, even when rare in the middle which is in no way hot enough to kill much of anything.
Can bacteria somehow work through poultry muscle fibers in a way it cannot through a mammal's?
Even in situations where there is cross contamination... can that contamination somehow work its way into the meat in a way it cannot with beef? That's where I am really perplexed.
It's not that I want to eat medium rare chicken (gross) it's that I'm trying to understand why poultry, even if it's a whole breast I have cut from a whole chicken myself, gets basically the same treatment as ground/tenderized beef. Salmonella is nasty, but a few minutes at 150ºF will kill it just as effectively as pretty much any other bacterium.Comment
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Does the flatness matter if I cook the whole surface? Let's say I dropped it in 350ºF vat of oil for long enough to heat the surface to 165ºF. Again, I'm not trying to figure out a way to eat raw chicken. I'm trying to figure out why the rules differ from beef when the same bacteria involved dies at the same temperatures and is subject to the same physical limitation (i.e. still too big to squeeze between muscle fibers). -
They are figuring a higher load of bacteria on the chicken based on the processing differences. And remember, Log reduction is a theoretical reduction, lotta 9's, never 100%. People are still getting sick https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2018/...-turns-deadly/ -
Right. It's always a numbers game. Whenever something seems less likely than a car accident, I don't sweat it too much. Driving to get the chicken is probably more dangerous than anything else I do with it. The linked article is on ground turkey. I'm seeing a distinct link, especially with watching the documentary mentioned earlier, that more processing = more danger. I almost always work whole chickens and I feel better about that decision currently.
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Articles with the theme of "why do we eat raw beef or fish, but don't eat raw chicken?" seem to relate better to your question, binarypaladin
What I noted from some of the articles cited below is people who do prepare raw or lightly cooked chicken meat for eating generally use the meat from the internal portions of the chicken breast. (See the Mother Jones and Munchies.vice.com articles)
I have been wondering if there is an increased risk of bacterial contamination between layers of muscle in chicken due to how chicken is processed. (An example would be the interface between the main breast muscle vs the breast "tender".) I couldn't find any research studies that confirm my guess, so it's ... just a guess. If this kind of contamination happens, it would explain why chicken should be cooked to a higher internal temperature than other meats to ensure bacteria between the muscle layers is killed. Otherwise, theoretically one could just sear the outside and it's good.
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My guess about contamination within the muscle tissue seems correct.
"...Of the 140 examined skin samples, 66% were positive [for Campylobacter contamination], and the internal contamination of 115 sampled chicken legs was 27%...." Another tidbit -- "...it is essential to focus on two different routes of exposure for the consumer: (i) the classic route of exposure such as that which occurs through consumption of undercooked chicken, assuming presence of Campylobacter in the muscle and their survival throughout the cooking process and (ii) acquiring infection via cross contamination of Campylobacter to hands, kitchen utensils, or ready-to-eat food during the improper preparation of contaminated poultry or poultry products. For the exposure via the second route, the contamination of the chicken skin is decisive...." From http://jfoodprotection.org/doi/pdf/1...-028X-69.4.757
"...Carcass surfaces can carry high levels of Campylobacter and this leads to cross-contamination in both domestic and commercial catering. This is an important risk factor for infection. However, and perhaps more importantly, Campylobacter have been recovered from deep leg and breast muscle tissues of up to 27% of chickens tested. Furthermore, liver tissues are also commonly contaminated. In these tissues the bacteria will be better protected from the effects of cooking. Undercooked chicken meat and chicken liver are internationally important vehicles of Campylobacter infection...." https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=BB%2FJ017159%2F1
End edit
And here's some info of a more general nature --
"...Both Salmonella and Campylobacterare bacteria that occur naturally on a range of foods, including meat, eggs and all other fresh food including salads, vegetables, fruit and nuts. They are also considered to be ‘commensals’ of chickens, which means that they are part of the normal microflora of the chicken gut, where they can live without affecting the chicken...." From https://www.chicken.org.au/quality-and-food-safety/
"...Commercial chicken plants typically dip the meat in several baths before packaging, giving bacteria plenty of opportunity to spread. What’s more, says Smith DeWaal, it’s harder to cook away bacteria in chicken. "Chicken has creases and folds in the skin," she says. "Pathogens can hide in those folds. A lot of other meat doesn’t even come with skin on."..." From https://www.motherjones.com/environm...est-pathogens/
"...chicken is the number-one food vehicle for number of outbreak-associated illnesses that the CDC tracks...."
"...salmonella can be highly infectious, requiring only a small number of cells to be present to cause illness..."
"...chicken is different from fish or beef because of the meat’s structure; raw fish and beef generally come from whole-muscle cuts, which help prevent surface contamination...." From https://thetakeout.com/why-do-we-eat...ken-1827518047
"...minimizes the risk of contamination [in his chicken sashimi] by using meat from the inner breast of the chicken, which is far away from dangerous gut bacteria. The strips of raw chicken are also submerged in boiling water for 30 seconds before being cut up and served as an additional precaution...." From https://munchies.vice.com/en_us/arti...at-raw-chicken
"...Compared to the slaughtering process of mammals, the main differences to be noted for poultry slaughtering are (i) the use of a water bath (hot or chilled) at different stages of the process; (ii) the feather removal step, which can be mechanical and is performed differently from removing the skin of mammals; (iii) the small size of birds (compared to cattle or sheep, for example)..." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5620641/Last edited by IowaGirl; January 31, 2019, 02:10 PM.Comment
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IowaGirl thank you for that post. It's excellent. Articles and excerpts!
It appears that the muscle itself really isn't different. (My guess is that "in the muscle" probably referred to something like the space between the tender and the main breast.) It's the processing and relative irregularity in shape versus fish and larger animals that makes the difference. And, as Jerod Broussard had mentioned, injections. That's a big deal. I'm pretty sure the article on this site about turkeys says that pretty much all of them are injected. I hadn't even thought about feather removal either.
The chicken sashimi seems to bear out what I was thinking though, under certain circumstances you could totally treat chicken like any other muscle meat. And again, for everyone here, I am in no way interested aside from be better academic understanding of food prep and safety. I've done sous-vide chicken at 140ºF and... did not like the results at all.
My main takeaway from all of this, is that—in addition to being more economical—working with whole chickens is much safer than mass produced butchered parts. Other than when I want a bag of wings, I pretty much always work whole birds and if nothing else, this gives me another reason to keep doing so.
There are also so many caveats (crevices, skin, injections, folds) that unless you really know what you're doing and think about those details, you just can't treat it like steak. It's not that it's impossible, but even in the sashimi article, they mentioned that the Japanese don't just grab any old processed chicken and use it.
Also, in terms of cooking whole (or close to) birds, spatchcocking doesn't just produce a better, faster cook, but it definitely appears to produce a safer cook. Similarly, half birds, which have become my go-to for cooking a "whole" chicken, are safer too. The cavity appears to be one of the biggest danger zones.Comment
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"..(My guess is that "in the muscle" probably referred to something like the space between the tender and the main breast...."
I wondered that too, but they really did take tissue from inside the muscle, not tissue in between layers of muscle. They described how they flamed the surface of the muscle to sanitize it, then cut into the muscle with a scalpel and took samples about 1 cm deep. -
Gross.
Fortunately, I'm not interested in chicken sashimi! I am, however, comfortable with lower temperatures than a lot of people around here.
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And yet, we eat chicken like crazy, and most of us would be hard pressed to name a person or two, or probably anyone, who had a serious problem as a result.Comment
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You can look at the consumption of chicken over time in the US and see the rise of all manner of obesity and chronic illnesss. So, there’s not knowing anyone who ate chicken and died and there’s looking around McNugget land and seeing a lot of normal sick people. -
I assume you're saying a rise in chicken consumption has been accompanied by a rise in obesity and chronic illness. If so, probably more correlation than causation (though chicken can be prepared in many of unhealthy ways, such as McNuggets). However, being the cheapest of the big 3 meat choices-with pork and beef-it could also be increased chicken consumption is an indicator of poverty which in turn causes the consumption of a less healthy diet. I'm not claiming this is true, only possible. -
There's a rise of a lot of things though. Processed foods in general, sugar/refined carbs, etc. It's more how the food supply is managed with industrialization than any one thing like... a chicken. I'd argue the introduction of seed oils are one of the worst things we've added. I'd also argue massive increases in the use of corn and wheat are bigger issues.
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Yep, that's true. Maybe this means all those food safety warnings about cooking chicken are working?
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I love a good chicken. Don't plan to ever stop eating chicken. Having some bake chicken breasts tonight.
The problems we have regarding chicken can be better addressed if people are willing to pay more for their chicken. "Big Ag" operations aren't necessarily evil - they're just responding to consumer demand - and that demand is the lowest possible price. Unfortunately, most folks probably don't have the option of affording non-factory farmed/processed birds.
I've had salmonella poisoning once and it wasn't from chicken, it was from some processed deli meats I bought at Costco. If folks just take the recommended food handling/prep/cooking practices for chicken seriously then your risk is pretty low.
I mean, we live in a society where even bagged lettuce/salad seems to want to kill us these days - I'm more concerned about that than the chicken I eat.
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binarypaladin So after all has been said are you going to cook up some L&S bird and share the results - or are you going to chicken out?
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lol
This really didn't touch on L&S too much. Thing is, more I thought about it, even if you exclude food safety as an issue, how much do I want to double the cook time and effort on making chickens when H&F produces some delicious birds? I still hit lower internal temps than a lot of folks around here.
I might try it though. The only real advantages appears to be more smoke exposure and with poultry I'm not sure I need or even want it! If I do, I'll provide a write-up.
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