All Your Thanksgiving Food Safety Questions Answered
Family disagreements on Thanksgiving don’t end with politics at the dinner table : if you’ve ever stood in the kitchen arguing with your grandma about whether a turkey is ready, you know what we’re talking about. Therefore, we asked food safety expert Ben Chapman to resolve your most likely disputes.
Can I wash this wet juice off my raw turkey?
It’s a simple question: no. Your raw turkey may be covered in germs, but rinsing “doesn’t remove anything, it just sprinkles the entire kitchen,” Chapman says. Tiny droplets of germ water may be on the surface three feet away .
The advice remains valid even if the turkey is covered with an incomprehensible mucus. This is actually a biofilm made from stuck together bacteria, and washing will still not remove it completely. It is perfectly safe to leave these germs on the turkey because remember that you are going to cook it .
If the bird is covered in blood or bits of feathers, Chapman recommends wiping the turkey with a paper towel (which you throw away in sweat) or a kitchen towel (which you throw directly into the washing machine). spraying bacteria everywhere.
How do you know the turkey is ready?
With a thermometer , of course. The color of the meat or juices doesn’t tell you anything about the doneness, as this guide explains : juices can turn pink or clear depending on how stressed the animal was during slaughter (which changes the pH of the meat). The color of the bone depends on the age of the bird for slaughter. And pink meat can depend on the conditions of the frying or, again, the age of the bird. You can eat pink juice, meat or bones even when the poultry is cooked, or clear juices even if not already done.
So you have a thermometer. What temperature are you targeting? The old advice was to cook turkey at 180 degrees Fahrenheit, but that recommendation was partly based on what texture people like in their meat, Chapman says. The rules were later revised to recommend a minimum safe temperature, regardless of the taste of the meat, and this temperature is 165 . You can cook it hot if you like, but that won’t make it any safer.
However, there is a way to break this rule. Magic 165 is a temperature that instantly kills Salmonella and its friends, but you can also kill the same bacteria by keeping meat at a lower temperature for a longer time. For example, you can cook a turkey to just 150 degrees if you make sure it stays at 150 (or higher) for five minutes, which you can check with a high-tech thermometer like the iGrill . This high-tech thermometer stays in your turkey while it cooks and sends data to your smartphone. Compare this to the poultry temperature versus time graphs to ensure the turkey is safe.
Is it necessary to wash vegetables for a salad? What about the vegetables I’m going to cook?
Washing raw vegetables is “risk reduction,” Chapman says, not a guarantee of safety. Washing a head of lettuce can remove 90% or maybe up to 99% of harmful bacteria, but the remaining 1% can still cause disease. When fruits and vegetables are associated with foodborne disease outbreaks (actually, the number one source of such diseases ), they contain high enough bacteria levels that washing would not help.
Cooking reliably kills these germs so you don’t need to wash the vegetables you plan to cook. You can give them a scrub if they are covered in dirt, but if they look clean they can be used. Wash them if you want, but if you’re short on time, why bother?
If I cut raw meat on this cutting board and then wash it in soap and water, is it safe to use it again?
Almost, Chapman says: there’s one more step. After washing the cutting board, let it dry.
For day-to-day use, this is not a problem: cut up your food, wash your board and place it in the dryer (or just use the dishwasher) and it will be ready the next time you cook dinner. However, on turkey day, Chapman says he uses multiple cutting boards as there isn’t always enough time to dry a single reused board.
In this case, he recommends setting aside one set of boards for raw meat and vegetables to be cooked, and a separate board for ready meals that are already cooked and heading to the table.
More than two hours passed. Have the leftovers gone bad?
Not necessary, but it’s a good rule of thumb. For home cooks like you and me, it is recommended that you bring food from the oven to the refrigerator within two hours .
This is due to the microbe Clostridium perfringens, which cannot be completely destroyed by cooking. Although live C. perfringens do not survive cooking, they form heat-resistant spores — think of them as eggs that can later hatch baby bacteria. After a few hours on the turkey at room temperature, spores will hatch, bacteria will multiply, and they can form a heat-resistant toxin that can make you sick. Total time from oven to bacterial contamination: about four hours .
So you can technically leave leftovers for four hours at room temperature, Chapman says, but the two-hour rule was created to give you a good headroom in case you weren’t standing by the stove with a stopwatch. If you aim for two o’clock and hit three o’clock, you will be fine.
Should I chill leftover food before placing it in the refrigerator?
No, it’s an outdated rule, Chapman says. Old refrigerators can get overwhelmed if you put a lot of hot food in them at a time, but that’s not a problem for anything that’s been done in the last couple of decades. It’s best to refrigerate food as quickly as possible: as soon as you know you won’t be eating something, put it in the refrigerator.
Chapman says that when he carves the turkey, he puts the meat reserved for leftovers in zippered bags before serving the food. Separating into small bags helps to cool down faster. After dinner, he collects the rest of the meat in the same way.
And make sure your refrigerator is set to the correct temperature, he warns. Check with a thermometer: it should be below 41 degrees Fahrenheit, and preferably closer to 32 . The colder your refrigerator is, the longer your food will last.
The main hazard in chilled leftovers is listeria , a bacterium that can grow at refrigerator temperatures. The food is good for three or four days, so if you want to eat your turkey sandwiches on Monday, you can re-cook leftovers to kill Listeria . Reheating kills this pathogen, but not C. perfringens – which means reheating cannot save food that hasn’t been used for too long on Thursday.
Ben Chapman is an Adjunct Professor and Food Safety Specialist at North Carolina State University and co- author of the Food Safety Discussion podcast and the charmingly titled Barfblog website on Farm-to-Fork Safe Food .