I'm Just Here for the Food_ Version 2.0 - Alton Brown [121]
• Pork (non-ground) should be cooked to 150° F.
• Beef steaks can be cooked to desired doneness.
• Rolled roast needs to be cooked to 130° F and should be held here for at least 1 hour before being served.
• Fish should be cooked to 140° F.
• Ground beef should be cooked to 155° F.
• Ground pork should be cooked to 160° F.
• Ground turkey should be cooked to 170° F.
Cross Contamination
The leading cause of food-borne illnesses in home kitchens, cross contamination happens any time you give bugs a way to get from one place to another. Following is a possible scenario:
You come home from the market and the only place to put that raw chicken is on the middle shelf in the fridge. Unbeknownst to you, there is a small hole in the bag and some of the juice runs out. It pools at the back edge of the shelf, then a few drops run down the wall of the refrigerator, into the crisper drawer, and onto a loosely wrapped head of lettuce. Since your refrigerator’s running at an average of 45° F, this meager collection of bacterial pilgrims sets up a village, which within a few hours becomes a thriving metropolis. You take the lettuce out of the fridge, cut it into wedges on your cutting board, and build a salad, which you then set on the buffet half an hour before your guests arrive. Meanwhile, you cook the chicken to an internal temperature of 165° F, killing any salmonella or campylobacter that may be present. But you then cut it up on the very same cutting board with the very same knife you used for the lettuce, thus recontaminating it. Two or three days later, you start getting nasty letters from your friends written on hospital letterhead.
Unless you’ve tested it with a thermometer.
THAWING
Thawing’s a funny thing because it’s just like cooking inasmuch as it’s all about bringing a piece of food into thermal equilibrium with its surroundings. All the principles of cooking apply: temperature, conduction, convection, radiation, and density. When I tell folks that a block of ice will thaw faster under cold running water than in a 200° F oven, they think I’ve been in the nutmeg again (see Toxins). But it is indeed true. Cold water may be cold, but it’s dense, it’s a good conductor, and if it’s running it’s got convection on its side. The hot oven has temperature and radiation on its side, but unless you have the broiler on, that won’t be enough. So in order to keep thawing food (say, a frozen Cornish game hen) in the Zone for the shortest time possible, either thaw it in the refrigerator (slow but safe) or tightly wrapped and submerged in cold water up to 70° F that’s circulating somehow.
Had you placed the raw chicken in a container (say, a baking dish) and placed it on the bottom shelf, you wouldn’t be forced to wear a giant red S across your chest.
Human Contamination
Consider the strange case of Mary Mallon, a cook who worked in households from Long Island to Manhattan in the early years of the twentieth century. Mary gave a nasty form of salmonelosis to dozens if not hundreds of people without actually getting sick herself. Mary is known to history as Typhoid Mary not because she had the audacity to touch food with her hands (something I’m a big fan of), but because she didn’t wash her hands well enough or often enough. This drama repeats itself in homes and restaurants across America with alarming frequency. And all because we fail to do something most of us should have learned in kindergarten.
Hand-washing is a really big deal, and you should do it often while handling food, but there are a couple of other things you can do to keep your mitts in sanitary condition.
• Make sure you can turn the water on (hot and cold) at your kitchen sink without touching the taps with your hands. Touch the chicken, touch the tap, wash your hands, turn off the tap with your hand—you might as well have skipped the whole darned