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!
As a middle aged person who is generally healthy, I’ve never washed chicken. On a side note, we eat chicken weekly. I’ve not experienced diarrhea, or been really sick, or died post chicken eating. I could safely say 1/2 of the days of the year, at least, involve basic butcher parted out chicken, and it is delicious.
Washing a backyard/farm chicken post killing/plucking to remove blood and debris, sure. But what is the logic behind this strange internet trend?
You, like me, probably just cook the chicken properly.
Washed or not, chicken needs to be cooked properly, there’s nothing people do by washing the outside that will kill the salmonella inside the muscle. Hell, cooking will kill it on the surface right away so I don’t know what people think they’re doing by washing the outside!
The idea would be that due to suspected unsanitary conditions in which mass-produced meat products are collected and transported, additional substances and materials not fit for consumption become attached and go unnoticed.
Washing would remove the extra stuff supposedly.
So why only chicken then?
Because it’s the topic of this discussion?
Look at the comments and no one mentioned any other type of meat, it’s only chicken that they wash.
Or they only mentioned chicken because no one mentioned anything else and so they stayed on topic.
I think it’s just how boomers were raised. I’m middle-aged and I don’t wash chicken, but my boomer mom is horrified at the thought. She came for a visit and made sure I washed the chicken before I cooked with it. 🙄
My parents are boomers and don’t do this. Not a big sample, but it’s what I’ve got.
Better wash them:
Eating chickens is the most common source of Salmonella poisoning. A 2014 issue of Consumer Reports published that 97 percent of chicken breasts found in retail stores were contaminated with bacteria that could make people sick, and 38 percent of the Salmonella found was resistant to multiple antibiotics. And, according to a national retail-meat survey by the Food and Drug Administration, about 90 percent of retail chicken showed evidence of contamination with fecal matter.
Are you eating it raw???
Wouldn’t this be eliminated by cooking it
Better not wash them:
My source is the CD Fucking C.
Hostile response tone aside, seriously: cooking chicken kills the bacteria. Trying to wash it just splatters disease around your kitchen.
Hear me out, fill bowl with water. Place chicken in bowl. Swirl a bit. Wash chicken. Dump water. No splashy splashy.
Are you dumping the water straight into a black hole?
That’s just wasting water and accelerating the water wars! I re-use my chicken water to wash my vegetables, and then my dishes. It’s such a first-world mindset to callously single-use water like that!
Onto the neighbor’s dog so the stray cats annoy it!
Are you dumping the water straight into a black hole?
I splurged on my garbage disposal.
No. You don’t wash chicken. Take a paper towel and pat it down, and that’s it. Washing the chicken one way to contaminate your sink, cooking area, and other foods with salmonella. It’s super important to properly cook your chicken to kill any bacteria.
I’m cleaning my sink daily.
And everything within a couple feet of it, too?
Yes, I wipe down counters and stove daily with disinfectant cleaner.
Ok keep doing you and good luck. Hopefully any microdroplets don’t land elsewhere.
TIL American’s don’t cook their chicken
If only there was a better way to kill bacteria in food than just washing it.
Idk guys. I’m not scrubbing my chicken with bleach to kill bacteria. I just want to rinse off the shit from the factory. “Oh but they wash it!” I don’t believe they care enough to do it well. Whatever regulation is set forth by the CDC is kind of irrelevant if there is little enforcement.
Fucking lol!
If you cook the chicken properly, salmonella isn’t a concern.
not eaying animal products has made my life so much easier in that regard. no need to worry about all the pitentially dangerous stuff on and in dead animals, raised in disgusting conditions :3
Of all the things you shouldn’t eat raw, flour is probably the worst offender
Yeah, because you only eat cucumbers that have come from farms where forest nymphs cavort and gently brush away yucky bugs, rendering pesticides pointless The plants themselves are bathed in water from mountain springs far far away from Nestle and when it comes to be picked, it’s done by moonlight and only by the purest of maidens who definitely aren’t exploited.
You say that like vegetables can’t get covered in dirt or pesticides
And as if they don’t literally grow in poop
Plenty of vegetables get ecoli or similar as well. Washing your veggies is super important, with meat, just make sure it’s cooked thoroughly.
You know the same problems can happen and do happen quite often with dead plants too, right?
E Coli? Listeria?
Cooking actually kills bacteria as opposed to eating raw foods.
I love how you’ve just magically decided things based on no actual fact or logic lol
Does washing actually cause the fat to come off though?
I’ve had bloody chicken before which you do actually want to wash/clean off because cooked blood will completely destroy your dish.
Otherwise you can cut off some cartilage and hard fat that won’t render when cooked. No need to wash it.
Nope. The slimy stuff that comes off when you wash chicken is not fat and the pink liquid is myoglobin, not blood. The reason not to wash chicken is that it potentially sprays salmonella all around your sink. Basically, there is no good reason to wash chicken, but it shouldn’t affect the actual meat.
Not myoglobin, actual blood. Very rare, but sometimes the butcher didn’t drain properly.
You can tell because by that time, the blood has coagulated into a mush.
Myoglobin is clearish red and pink like you said. That’s stuff is fine.
Oh yeah for sure. I usually just cut that out if it’s a vein in the chicken or just scrape it off if its on the meat or skin.
Not myoglobin
Your chicken should already be clean enough when you unpack it. Just choke it thoroughly and don’t contaminate any surface with its juices.
when you unpack it. Just choke it thoroughly
This is sounding extremely unsanitary
Well… you don’t want it flapping around everywhere in your oven now, do you?
Why not?
Traumatizes the children
I thought you said it traumatizes the chicken the first time I read your comment. Lol
Probably both… It’s just that the chicken’s trauma won’t last as long…
As across the pond dweller, I am reading this and going “u wot m8?”
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
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.
Washed chicken won’t be any safer if it’s undercooked, salmonella isn’t a surface only danger, so you can remove the “unwashed” part at the beginning.
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.
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
I often wash my beef and pork with a vinegar mixture called mustard then scrub it with a dry abrasive spice mix before I put it on a smoker for a few hours before searing the outside for a few minutes.
I don’t know how I survived before these meat washing times.
I do not think I have ever washed any chicken I have prepared, EVER
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
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”
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.
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. 😀
Yes clearly we are talking about highly processed packaged foods /s
Only meat I routinely wash is porkchops. Slimiest stuff on the market
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
Just stick it in the dishwasher.
Wash it, it’s disgusting. Also clean off the gross white stuff and as much fat as you can. I leave the skin though.
If you bump up your hot water heater, it’ll cook it there too.
Right next to the cast iron pan! 😌
Washing is to remove salmonella…wtf is wrong with you ppl???
If the salmonella is on the outside, shouldn’t you cook the outside of the chicken?
Since you can kill the salmonella in eggs without cooking the egg (as in pasturised egg), then the temperature that kills salmonella seems low enough that any form of cooking will kill whatever salmonella is on the outside of the chicken.
