Do you wash the chicken before cooking?

Since childhood, parents taught us to wash products before eating them. As a rule, this concerned fruits, vegetables, nuts or dried fruits. When we, as adults, began to comprehend the basics of home cooking, then experienced, connoisseurs or the same parents, wise experience, certainly instructed: you must wash the chicken! However, if everything is clear and logical with the same apples or tomatoes, then the “meat theme” is far from unambiguous ...

Debunking Myths

It would seem that washing the carcass of a store chicken before cutting it for frying or soup - what could be more logical? After all, it is not known how, where, and under what conditions it was stored until it appeared in our grocery basket. But, according to scientists from food technology, washing the chicken before cooking is strictly prohibited!

The point is not in any deterioration in taste, but in the fact that when washing a bird under water, pathogenic bacteria are washed off from the surface of the meat and its insides. Whether you use running or standing water, salmonella, capillobacter and other dangerous bacteria due to this very water will easily spread throughout the sink, wash, walls around and your skin. This process is called aerosolization.

Do not think that with the drying of the liquid, the bacteria will also die. Probably a different, less pleasant outcome, when the same Salmonella "migrates" to other kitchen surfaces and cutlery.

Of course, raw chicken comes in contact with many surfaces and outside the sink - with a cutting board, a knife blade and the hands of a cook. Since meat has to come into contact with so many items, is it not better to wash it beforehand to reduce the risk of infection?

One important thing to understand: the contact with the surfaces is controlled by the cook, and these surfaces will subsequently be thoroughly washed using cleaning and antibacterial agents, but the stream of water that hit the bird’s carcass will scatter along the sink, walls, cookery’s clothes with millions of microdrops, in which the infection will live. No less than the “affected area” in the case of stagnant water. Is it after such a “shower” for one small chicken that you want to arrange spring cleaning in the kitchen and washing your own clothes?

Not only chicken is at risk

This rule of spreading bacteria from the surface of meat through water does not apply only to chicken.

Pathogens reproduce on other types of meat:

• pork
• beef
• lamb
• all other types of birds.

Even if you purchased, for example, fillets in vacuum packaging, this does not guarantee that bacteria did not begin to spread on it during the harvesting of such a product.

Thus, the preparation approach will be the same regardless of what kind of product you are going to cook and what you are going to do with it: before cooking, frying, baking or cutting for freezing, you can’t wash the meat!

How to be?

A reasonable question: how to prepare such an important ingredient for further work if it is impossible to process it with water, and the surface is teeming with infection? And if it is corny dirty?

To the second question you can immediately give an equally reasonable answer: do not purchase such a product! If you see that the carcass has a completely unpresentable, dirty look and smells unimportant, then you are unlikely to cook a delicacy from it, and even heat treatment will not save you from digestive problems or even more serious problems.

The answer to the first question is also simple. Use improvised means for cleaning and preparing meat:

• disposable wipes;
• paper towels;
• any other clean disposable cloth.

In addition, modern stores offer customers a quite tolerable product, and in few places you can see chicken carcasses with dirt on the surface in the form of sand, feathers or blood. Who will buy such a product?

High cooking also speaks in favor of such meat preparation. For example, professional chefs recommend thoroughly drying pieces of meat before frying so that there is no moisture on their surface, because from contact with hot oil or just a hot frying pan, moisture instantly boils and starts to sprinkle in all directions. The result of such cooking is a dirty stove and everything around it.

But even if you do not trust ordinary napkins, then anyway, with further heat treatment, any pathogenic bacteria will surely die both on the surface and inside the piece of meat. For example, with salmonella, it is enough to adhere to the following rules to protect yourself.

Salmonella dies:

• when heating meat to 55 degrees Celsius for one hour;
• when heated to 60 degrees Celsius for 12 minutes;
• when reheating (reheating) at a temperature of 75 degrees Celsius for 10 minutes.

At the same time, the cold does not affect the viability of this infection, therefore, freezing chicken is only a procurement measure, but not a disinfecting one. However, you must admit that any meat that you cook must reach the indicated temperatures during such processing during such periods of time.

Remember: following the simple, logical rules of home-based food technology is the key to the culinary success and health of your family!