Answers to All the Food Safety Questions You’ll Have This Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving family disagreements aren’t limited to politics at the dinner table : If you’ve ever stood in the kitchen and argued with grandma about whether the turkey was done, you know what we mean. That’s why we asked food safety expert Ben Chapman to resolve your most likely disputes.
Can I wash this runny juice off a raw turkey?
It’s a simple question: no. Your raw turkey may be covered in germs, but rinsing “removes nothing and just disperses it around the kitchen,” Chapman says. Tiny droplets of bacterial water can end up on surfaces up to three feet away .
This advice holds true even if the turkey is covered in unidentifiable mucus. It’s actually a biofilm of bacteria stuck together, and washing still won’t remove it completely. It’s perfectly safe to leave these germs on the turkey because remember, you’ll have to cook it .
If the bird is covered in blood or feather bits, Chapman recommends wiping the turkey with either a paper towel (which you throw away) or a kitchen towel (which you toss directly into the washing machine). spattering bacteria everywhere.
How can you tell when a turkey is ready?
Of course, with a thermometer . The color of the meat or juices doesn’t tell you anything about doneness, as this guide explains : juices may be pink or clear depending on how stressed the animal was at the time of slaughter (which changes the pH of the meat). The color of the bones depends on the age of the bird at slaughter. And pink meat may depend on the baking conditions or, again, on the age of the bird. There may be pink juices, meat or bones even when the bird is cooked, or clear juices even if it is not yet done.
So you have a thermometer. What temperature are you targeting? According to Chapman, the old advice was to cook the turkey to 180 degrees Fahrenheit, but that recommendation was based in part on what kind of meat texture people liked. Guidelines were later revised to recommend a minimum safe temperature, regardless of meat flavor, at 165°C . You can cook it hotter if you like, but that won’t make it any safer.
However, there is a way to get around this rule. The magic temperature of 165 is the temperature that instantly kills salmonella and its friends, but you can also kill the same bacteria by holding the meat at a lower temperature for a longer time. For example, you can cook a turkey to just 150 degrees as long as you make sure it stays at 150 (or higher) for five minutes, which you can check with a Bluetooth thermometer like the iGrill . This high-tech thermometer stays in your turkey while it cooks and sends data to your smartphone. Compare its readings to these poultry time and temperature charts to make sure your turkey is safe.
Do I need to wash vegetables for salad? What about the vegetables I’m going to cook?
Washing raw vegetables is a “risk reduction,” Chapman says, not a guarantee of safety. Washing a head of lettuce can remove 90%, maybe 99%, of the bad bacteria, but the remaining 1% can still make you sick. When foodborne illness outbreaks involve fruits and vegetables (in fact , the number one source of such illnesses ), they have high enough levels of bacteria that washing them wouldn’t help much.
Cooking reliably kills these germs, so you don’t have to wash the vegetables you plan to cook. You may want to scrub them with a scrub if they’re covered in dirt, but if they look clean, they’re safe to use. 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 with soap and water, is it safe to use again?
Almost, says Chapman: “There’s one more step. After washing the cutting board, you need to let it dry.
For everyday use, this is no problem: cut up your food, wash the board and put it in the drying rack (or just use the dishwasher) and it’ll be ready the next time you make dinner. However, on turkey day, Chapman says she uses multiple cutting boards because there isn’t always enough time for one reused board to dry.
In this case, he recommends dedicating one set of boards for raw meats and vegetables that will be cooked, and a separate board for prepared foods that are already cooked and sent to the table.
More than two hours passed. Did the leftovers go bad?
Not required, but it’s a good rule of thumb. For home cooks like you and me, it’s recommended that you allow food to get from the oven to the refrigerator within two hours .
This is due to the microbe Clostridium perfringens , which cannot be completely destroyed by cooking. While live C. perfringens won’t survive cooking, they will form heat-resistant spores —think of them as eggs that can later hatch into baby bacteria. After a few hours of sitting on the turkey at room temperature, the spores will hatch, the bacteria will multiply and be able to produce a heat-resistant toxin that can make you sick. Total time from oven to bacteria absorption: about four hours.
So technically, you can leave leftovers at room temperature for four hours, Chapman says, but the two-hour rule was created to give you a good margin of safety in case you’re not standing over the stove with a stopwatch. If you aim for two hours and make it by three, you’ll be fine.
Do I need to refrigerate leftovers before putting them in the refrigerator?
“No, it’s an outdated rule,” Chapman says. Older refrigerators can get overloaded if you cram a lot of hot food into them at once, but that’s not a problem for anything made in the last couple of decades. It’s best to chill food as quickly as possible: as soon as you know you won’t be eating something, put it in the refrigerator.
Chapman says when he carves a turkey, he puts the meat intended for leftovers in Ziploc bags before he even serves the food. Dividing it into small packets will help it cool faster. After dinner, he packs the rest of the meat in the same way.
And make sure your refrigerator is set to the right temperature, he warns. Check it with a thermometer: it should be below 41 degrees Fahrenheit, preferably closer to 32 . The colder your refrigerator, the longer your food will last.
The main danger in refrigerated leftovers is listeria , a bacteria that can grow at refrigerator temperatures. The food will last three to four days, so if you’re craving turkey sandwiches on Monday, you can re-cook the leftovers to kill listeria . Reheating kills this pathogen but not C. perfringens , meaning that reheating may not save food that has been stored too long on Thursday.