Should You Wash Your Chicken Before you Cook It?

Don't Wash Your Chicken Before You Cook It

  Americans eat a lot of chicken each year—82.2 pounds per person in 2010 alone!  Here are 9 things you should know about your favorite bird, including safety tips as well.

For the best possible bird, --

1.DON'T  Wash the Chicken
This may come as a shock to those of you who  rinse your poultry just before cooking. So why not, you may ask.  Cross contamination! Rinsing your chicken is an ideal way to send nasty pathogens all over your sink and the areas near by. Rinsing never did get rid of germs anyway. Instead, try to get the bird onto the baking pan with as little handling as possible. Then wipe down your counter with hot soapy water or a mixture of hot water and 1 tablespoon liquid bleach.

2.DON'T Use an Old Plastic Cutting Board
There’s an ongoing controversy about the safety of wood versus plastic boards for cutting raw chicken. As it turns out, old plastic cutting boards must be run through a dishwasher to be sanitized. Wood boards, on the other hand, are equally clean after a hand washing.

3. DON'T Forget to Wash Your Hands
We can't say this enough: Wash your hands well and scrub under your nails. Have you noticed that chefs and serious cooks don’t have long nails? And they tend not to wear jewelry, either. Both provide great hiding places for bacteria. That mysterious stomach bug you had could very well have been a case of food poisoning from your own kitchen!

4.DON'T  Ignore the Magic Number
A lot of people aren’t aware that the USDA dropped the recommended safe temperatures for all cooked poultry five years ago to 165°F. The good news is that this results in juicy, tender meat. (The old temperatures were 180°F for a whole roast bird tested in the thigh, or 170°F for a breast. Both often result in dryed out chicken.)

5. DON'T Pull It Out When it Looks Done
The best way to know when your chicken has reached the proper temp is an instant-read thermometer. “You really can’t tell by looking,” says Diane Van, Manager of the USDA Meat and Poultry Hotline, who suggests you may want to test your chicken in more than one spot. This is particularly important with a whole roast bird: Test both thighs and the thickest part of the breasts.

6.DON'T  Let Your Chicken Hang Around
Cook your chicken within two days of buying it. Home refridgerators are warmer than the meat cases in stores (which can go as low as 26°F) And most people tend to open their fridge often. Keep it any longer and, even if the sell-by date is way in the future, you’ll probably end up tossing it once you open the package and smell that "this chicken's been here too long" aroma. 

7. DON'T Throw Out the Scraps
Once you make this part of your routine, you’ll wonder why you didn’t start a long time ago. When you’ve got a decent pile of scraps, parts, skin, and bones, dump them in a pot and make a homemade chicken stock. So much better, and cheaper than commercial.

 

8.DON'T  Trim All the Fats
The fat police want us to skim and snip every bit of fat from our meat and stocks, but chicken fat has some winning qualities. It is high in palmitoleic acid, which is thought to be an immune booster, and it can also be a source of oleic acid, which is a good thing for cholesterol.  Also, poultry fats are low in polyunsaturated fatty acids, making them more stable than other fats at higher heat.

9. DON'T Roast or Broil It High-heat roasting doesn’t always result in perfect skin, and broiling can dry out the meat. Here’s a chef tip: Pan-roast your chicken.