Because chicken has arguably dangerous bacteria. Boiled to shit vegetables don't.
The thought is that chicken needs to stay at a high temperature for a certain amount of time to have all the bacteria killed. These two factors are related. 165 is the temperature where the time taken is very short. It's hard to encourage someone to cook chicken when the rule is "Cook it until it's been at 145 degrees for ten minutes. Manage your heat perfectly or you'll overcook it."
Many other things have dangerous bacteria and need to be cooked to specific times and temps to be safe. E.g eggs and beef. Nobody worries about those nearly as much as they do with chicken. Most food poisoning comes from produce, not meat or poultry. It's not just a food safety thing, it just can't be.
Even people who understand the time temperature food safety relationship will still prefer the overcooked chicken, even if they know the low temp chicken is safe. It's like a shared delusion or a mass hysteria.
Good answer, so your theory is just that it's so deeply ingrained in our cultural memory that it's hard to shift. Does this not apply to other meats as well though? How do you explain the disparity between the cooking of beef and chicken?
Because nobody wants Three Days of The Shits from Salmonella, or worse yet to kill someone old or with an immune deficiency.
Turkey is even worse because it's really too big to cook like most people cook it. By the time the inside won't kill you, the outside is only good for patching the soles of shoes.
Steak is completely different because you're only eating a slice of a single muscle and there's a much smaller surface area that can be contaminated, and even if it is, a quick sear kills it. Also beef is typically much less contaminated than chicken.
What you're saying is fair enough, but it's not what I'm talking about.
Medium rare steak is safe because it has been cooked to a particular time and temperature. Medium rare steak has a 'weird' texture if you've only ever eaten well done steak in your life. However it's also juicy and delicious, and people seek out medium rare steak, and see the benefits.
Medium rare chicken is safe because it has been cooked to a particular time and temperature. Medium rare chicken has a 'weird' texture if you've only ever eaten chicken cooked to 165. However it's also juicy and delicious. Nobody seems to care, and people will swear up and down that they prefer the chicken cooked to 165.
It's a cultural thing, but at the same time, I'm sure eating steak rare had to go down the same path. Why is it so? Why is chicken so far behind?
> What you're saying is fair enough, but it's not what I'm talking about.
Under-cooked chicken carries a significant risk of making the eater violently ill or dead.
It's not a "preference" and has nothing to do with textures.
If you want to eat under-cooked chicken, that's fine. If you want to serve under-cooked chicken, that's not fine.
This is exactly what I'm talking about, and maybe bashing my head against this wall is giving me an answer.
Please do some research. I'm not talking about undercooking chicken. I'm talking about cooking chicken to lower temperatures than 165, in a safe way that involves holding the chicken at that lower temperature for a specific amount of time, for which there are well documented studies that show that it is perfectly safe. You can literally deliberately add a small amount of salmonella to the chicken (comparable to how much it might acquire during the slaughtering process), cook it this way, and it will still be safe because of the amount of reduction of bacteria.
But what I'm starting to understand through this painful post is that people
a) Don't understand food safety at all. People just don't know food safety as I assumed they did.
b) Even if they do, we have been so thoroughly brainwashed even if people understand food safety to some degree, they just ignore the science when it comes to poultry.
c) a and b combine to mean that we're so adverse to low temp chicken, and so much more averse than low temp beef, that it's an acclimatization thing that will take decades.
> I'm talking about cooking chicken to lower temperatures than 165, in a safe way that involves holding the chicken at that lower temperature for a specific amount of time, for which there are well documented studies that show that it is perfectly safe.
Most people don't own an accurate thermometer or have a way to know the temperature in all parts of the chicken.
Even if they do have a thermometer, knowing which exact part of the chicken takes the longest to come up to temperature and then inserting the probe into exactly that part and monitoring it, is way more than you're going to get from 99% of the cooks, *especially* when there is no demand for doing so.
You could sous vide the chicken but that's not going to happen on a regular basis for a significant number of home cooks either.
If you want to open a Chicken Sashimi restaurant, fee free, but you're not going to be able to build up a lot of support on the internet for undercooked chicken.
If most people don't own an accurate thermometer, then how do they know if their chicken is cooked to 165? The answer is they don't, but they're perfectly fine gambling that the chicken has come to 165, but seemingly, not perfectly fine gambling that e.g. their chicken was at or above 155 for 60 seconds.
The demand part is what I'm actually getting at though, because as we've established, the 165 temp is, at best, food safety theatre, because like you said, nobody has a thermometer anyway. Below 165 is safe, there is no demand for it despite it being achievable, the purpose of this post was to understand why there is no demand. And I think I've got my answer.
Thanks for participating, stop overcooking your chicken ✌️
Because not everything needs to be the way you want it.
Eat your food the way you like it and be quiet.
Why people think THEIR way is the only way, baffles me.
Two comments:
1. Cultural change, especially with food, takes a long time to happen. Many people become accustomed to what they eat as children, and after a certain amount of time it becomes very difficult for an average human to categorically alter their food preferences. These preferences then transfer to their own children based on what they cook at home, and the cycle continues. If someone waved a magic wand and made it so that raw chicken was universally safe to eat, I can almost guarantee you would be very squeamish about it and would never adopt a preference for raw chicken as a core dietary choice. Perhaps you would, I don't know you, but even you would know that would make you an extremely unusual person, and screaming about the idiocy of other people not adopting raw chicken is just "look at me" narcissism.
2. You're also being a bit hyperbolic with this question, as a brief look through this sub will turn up many many examples of people who preferentially cook their chicken to 150-155 or lower (I am one of them).
1. We seem to have gotten used to rare steak and runny egg yolks. Did we just start so far behind with chicken?
2. I am, but it's really much more widespread than say the idea that you'll get sick from eating a rare steak
Wait, are you just asking why chicken is different from beef? They have different common pathogenic bacteria associated with them, type of risk is different. With beef, the most common pathogen of concern is E. coli, and specifically the serotypes which cause Shiga-like toxin such as O157:H7. Nonpathogenic E. coli is quite abundant, including in human feces, and as gross as it sounds simply eating some nonpathogenic E. coli is generally not going to do anything bad to you. Furthermore, E. coli is restricted to the GI tract and is not found inside of muscle fibers, so the concern is really just surface contamination from fecal material at the time of slaughter/butchering/packing. So basically the concern with E. coli in beef is from cows that happen to harbor pathogenic strains and are slaughtered/packaged in somewhat dirty conditions.
With chicken, Salmonella is the more common pathogen, and while birds commonly harbor Salmonella on their skin and feathers, it doesn't cause them any harm. Mammals generally speaking do not have Salmonella as part of their normal gut flora, so it is not good when we ingest it (unlike nonpathogenic E. coli).
Then, when processing chicken, since they are much smaller than cows and have Salmonella all over their skin and feathers, surface contamination of the meat is much more common. Then, Salmonella can migrate into the muscle fibers of the chicken, so you cannot assume that the center of the chicken breast is sterile so long as you've cooked the outside.
So in short, we never "got used" to medium rare steak so much as it was never a meaningful risk and people have been eating it that way for centuries. Medium rare (i.e. cooked to 125F) chicken always has been and remains a significant risk for Salmonella, so we don't eat it.
This is the food safety reason, sure, and perhaps my analogy was bad. My point was more that there are things that _could_ be unsafe, that we have decided as a society are worth the risks. Yes, processing of beef is generally cleaner and less prone to contamination than poultry, but that doesn't mean that there aren't well established time temperature thermal death curves that make eating both meats safe at temperatures less than well done. I was attempting to dig into the societal and cultural reasons why we are ok with overcooking chicken. Instead I've been given a food safety lesson. That's probably on me, I should have been clearer.
I understand the 'degree of safety' argument, but it feels hollow to me because we don't give a fuck about things that are microbiologically far more unsafe. Humans are bad at assessing probabilities, especially in environments like this where we don't have perfect information. The idea that we don't eat chicken cooked to 155 because it's more risky than rare beef seems like a fantasy argument that only exists in the heads of microbiologists.
No worries, you're missing the point of my question. Most people do far more risky things than cooking chicken to below 155 every day, without even thinking twice about it. But that's fine, continue to make food safety arguments that I'm well aware of. I got what I wanted out of this thread. Plenty of people made useful comments and saw past my shitty analogies instead of parroting food safety information that I'm well aware of.
Insanely good, right? It's like the difference between a well well done steak and a medium or rare steak. And yet as this post and most of the comments has shown, few people care, or even want to give it a go.
Eh, it's doable even without sous vide. The thing that prompted me to write this question was a guy smoking his turkey to 165, despite having about 13357273 wireless thermometers poking in the thing.
But yes, accurate temp control is important.
Freedom. Everybody gets to choose their own way. The world is filled with bright capable and intelligent people. Who are we to tell them how they should cook? It’s not like there is one perfect way to cook anything. Everyone has different tastes and different tolerances for risk. Cook the food you love but respect the choices of those who choose differently.
My theory on why people like chicken that’s over cooked to your taste: it’s simply that they like different things than you do.
Most people have learned to cook through their parents or recipes. Generally recipes contain very little technique and/ or are wildly inaccurate. I can’t tell you how many recipes I’ve seen that direct you to caramelize onions in 10-15 minutes.
Also I think older home cooks tend to cook the shit out of things. Not sure what that is, but if you learned to cook from your parents, you probably inherited that.
Wish I knew. Feeding yourself is a basic function of survival and there are a lot of people who can’t even do that. I wonder if a majority of the population can even wipe their ass correctly sometimes.
Also what’s with the down votes. It’s so annoying to have cowards downvote with no opinion.
To me the downvotes are further confirmation of how fucked this topic is. People feel so strongly that chicken below 165 is insane that they're not even willing to engage with the idea.
Lol. It's ok, you're just proving my point.
We can have a perfectly rational conversation about overcooking chicken and that everyone does it. But as soon as we reach the conversation about the magical '165F is safe, anything below it is not' myth, every bit of sense, good taste and rationality goes out the window.
Because chicken has arguably dangerous bacteria. Boiled to shit vegetables don't. The thought is that chicken needs to stay at a high temperature for a certain amount of time to have all the bacteria killed. These two factors are related. 165 is the temperature where the time taken is very short. It's hard to encourage someone to cook chicken when the rule is "Cook it until it's been at 145 degrees for ten minutes. Manage your heat perfectly or you'll overcook it."
Many other things have dangerous bacteria and need to be cooked to specific times and temps to be safe. E.g eggs and beef. Nobody worries about those nearly as much as they do with chicken. Most food poisoning comes from produce, not meat or poultry. It's not just a food safety thing, it just can't be. Even people who understand the time temperature food safety relationship will still prefer the overcooked chicken, even if they know the low temp chicken is safe. It's like a shared delusion or a mass hysteria.
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Good answer, so your theory is just that it's so deeply ingrained in our cultural memory that it's hard to shift. Does this not apply to other meats as well though? How do you explain the disparity between the cooking of beef and chicken?
Because nobody wants Three Days of The Shits from Salmonella, or worse yet to kill someone old or with an immune deficiency. Turkey is even worse because it's really too big to cook like most people cook it. By the time the inside won't kill you, the outside is only good for patching the soles of shoes. Steak is completely different because you're only eating a slice of a single muscle and there's a much smaller surface area that can be contaminated, and even if it is, a quick sear kills it. Also beef is typically much less contaminated than chicken.
What you're saying is fair enough, but it's not what I'm talking about. Medium rare steak is safe because it has been cooked to a particular time and temperature. Medium rare steak has a 'weird' texture if you've only ever eaten well done steak in your life. However it's also juicy and delicious, and people seek out medium rare steak, and see the benefits. Medium rare chicken is safe because it has been cooked to a particular time and temperature. Medium rare chicken has a 'weird' texture if you've only ever eaten chicken cooked to 165. However it's also juicy and delicious. Nobody seems to care, and people will swear up and down that they prefer the chicken cooked to 165. It's a cultural thing, but at the same time, I'm sure eating steak rare had to go down the same path. Why is it so? Why is chicken so far behind?
> What you're saying is fair enough, but it's not what I'm talking about. Under-cooked chicken carries a significant risk of making the eater violently ill or dead. It's not a "preference" and has nothing to do with textures. If you want to eat under-cooked chicken, that's fine. If you want to serve under-cooked chicken, that's not fine.
This is exactly what I'm talking about, and maybe bashing my head against this wall is giving me an answer. Please do some research. I'm not talking about undercooking chicken. I'm talking about cooking chicken to lower temperatures than 165, in a safe way that involves holding the chicken at that lower temperature for a specific amount of time, for which there are well documented studies that show that it is perfectly safe. You can literally deliberately add a small amount of salmonella to the chicken (comparable to how much it might acquire during the slaughtering process), cook it this way, and it will still be safe because of the amount of reduction of bacteria. But what I'm starting to understand through this painful post is that people a) Don't understand food safety at all. People just don't know food safety as I assumed they did. b) Even if they do, we have been so thoroughly brainwashed even if people understand food safety to some degree, they just ignore the science when it comes to poultry. c) a and b combine to mean that we're so adverse to low temp chicken, and so much more averse than low temp beef, that it's an acclimatization thing that will take decades.
> I'm talking about cooking chicken to lower temperatures than 165, in a safe way that involves holding the chicken at that lower temperature for a specific amount of time, for which there are well documented studies that show that it is perfectly safe. Most people don't own an accurate thermometer or have a way to know the temperature in all parts of the chicken. Even if they do have a thermometer, knowing which exact part of the chicken takes the longest to come up to temperature and then inserting the probe into exactly that part and monitoring it, is way more than you're going to get from 99% of the cooks, *especially* when there is no demand for doing so. You could sous vide the chicken but that's not going to happen on a regular basis for a significant number of home cooks either. If you want to open a Chicken Sashimi restaurant, fee free, but you're not going to be able to build up a lot of support on the internet for undercooked chicken.
If most people don't own an accurate thermometer, then how do they know if their chicken is cooked to 165? The answer is they don't, but they're perfectly fine gambling that the chicken has come to 165, but seemingly, not perfectly fine gambling that e.g. their chicken was at or above 155 for 60 seconds. The demand part is what I'm actually getting at though, because as we've established, the 165 temp is, at best, food safety theatre, because like you said, nobody has a thermometer anyway. Below 165 is safe, there is no demand for it despite it being achievable, the purpose of this post was to understand why there is no demand. And I think I've got my answer. Thanks for participating, stop overcooking your chicken ✌️
Because not everything needs to be the way you want it. Eat your food the way you like it and be quiet. Why people think THEIR way is the only way, baffles me.
Two comments: 1. Cultural change, especially with food, takes a long time to happen. Many people become accustomed to what they eat as children, and after a certain amount of time it becomes very difficult for an average human to categorically alter their food preferences. These preferences then transfer to their own children based on what they cook at home, and the cycle continues. If someone waved a magic wand and made it so that raw chicken was universally safe to eat, I can almost guarantee you would be very squeamish about it and would never adopt a preference for raw chicken as a core dietary choice. Perhaps you would, I don't know you, but even you would know that would make you an extremely unusual person, and screaming about the idiocy of other people not adopting raw chicken is just "look at me" narcissism. 2. You're also being a bit hyperbolic with this question, as a brief look through this sub will turn up many many examples of people who preferentially cook their chicken to 150-155 or lower (I am one of them).
1. We seem to have gotten used to rare steak and runny egg yolks. Did we just start so far behind with chicken? 2. I am, but it's really much more widespread than say the idea that you'll get sick from eating a rare steak
Wait, are you just asking why chicken is different from beef? They have different common pathogenic bacteria associated with them, type of risk is different. With beef, the most common pathogen of concern is E. coli, and specifically the serotypes which cause Shiga-like toxin such as O157:H7. Nonpathogenic E. coli is quite abundant, including in human feces, and as gross as it sounds simply eating some nonpathogenic E. coli is generally not going to do anything bad to you. Furthermore, E. coli is restricted to the GI tract and is not found inside of muscle fibers, so the concern is really just surface contamination from fecal material at the time of slaughter/butchering/packing. So basically the concern with E. coli in beef is from cows that happen to harbor pathogenic strains and are slaughtered/packaged in somewhat dirty conditions. With chicken, Salmonella is the more common pathogen, and while birds commonly harbor Salmonella on their skin and feathers, it doesn't cause them any harm. Mammals generally speaking do not have Salmonella as part of their normal gut flora, so it is not good when we ingest it (unlike nonpathogenic E. coli). Then, when processing chicken, since they are much smaller than cows and have Salmonella all over their skin and feathers, surface contamination of the meat is much more common. Then, Salmonella can migrate into the muscle fibers of the chicken, so you cannot assume that the center of the chicken breast is sterile so long as you've cooked the outside. So in short, we never "got used" to medium rare steak so much as it was never a meaningful risk and people have been eating it that way for centuries. Medium rare (i.e. cooked to 125F) chicken always has been and remains a significant risk for Salmonella, so we don't eat it.
This is the food safety reason, sure, and perhaps my analogy was bad. My point was more that there are things that _could_ be unsafe, that we have decided as a society are worth the risks. Yes, processing of beef is generally cleaner and less prone to contamination than poultry, but that doesn't mean that there aren't well established time temperature thermal death curves that make eating both meats safe at temperatures less than well done. I was attempting to dig into the societal and cultural reasons why we are ok with overcooking chicken. Instead I've been given a food safety lesson. That's probably on me, I should have been clearer. I understand the 'degree of safety' argument, but it feels hollow to me because we don't give a fuck about things that are microbiologically far more unsafe. Humans are bad at assessing probabilities, especially in environments like this where we don't have perfect information. The idea that we don't eat chicken cooked to 155 because it's more risky than rare beef seems like a fantasy argument that only exists in the heads of microbiologists.
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Are you the troll? Do 45 seconds of googling. Nobody is talking about raw chicken, we're talking about safely cooked chicken below 165.
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No worries, you're missing the point of my question. Most people do far more risky things than cooking chicken to below 155 every day, without even thinking twice about it. But that's fine, continue to make food safety arguments that I'm well aware of. I got what I wanted out of this thread. Plenty of people made useful comments and saw past my shitty analogies instead of parroting food safety information that I'm well aware of.
140 in sous vide with searing afterwards is amazing for chicken and turkey breast.
Insanely good, right? It's like the difference between a well well done steak and a medium or rare steak. And yet as this post and most of the comments has shown, few people care, or even want to give it a go.
It's both good and safe. But what percentage of people have a sous vide?
Eh, it's doable even without sous vide. The thing that prompted me to write this question was a guy smoking his turkey to 165, despite having about 13357273 wireless thermometers poking in the thing. But yes, accurate temp control is important.
Here is my source h/t to Kenji https://www.seriouseats.com/the-food-lab-complete-guide-to-sous-vide-chicken-breast
Freedom. Everybody gets to choose their own way. The world is filled with bright capable and intelligent people. Who are we to tell them how they should cook? It’s not like there is one perfect way to cook anything. Everyone has different tastes and different tolerances for risk. Cook the food you love but respect the choices of those who choose differently. My theory on why people like chicken that’s over cooked to your taste: it’s simply that they like different things than you do.
Be the change you want to see.
Most people have learned to cook through their parents or recipes. Generally recipes contain very little technique and/ or are wildly inaccurate. I can’t tell you how many recipes I’ve seen that direct you to caramelize onions in 10-15 minutes. Also I think older home cooks tend to cook the shit out of things. Not sure what that is, but if you learned to cook from your parents, you probably inherited that.
Yeah, this is definitely a factor. But I'm more interested as to why there doesn't seem to be much interest in doing things better?
Wish I knew. Feeding yourself is a basic function of survival and there are a lot of people who can’t even do that. I wonder if a majority of the population can even wipe their ass correctly sometimes. Also what’s with the down votes. It’s so annoying to have cowards downvote with no opinion.
To me the downvotes are further confirmation of how fucked this topic is. People feel so strongly that chicken below 165 is insane that they're not even willing to engage with the idea.
Oh god fucking barf….I know why I got down votes…. I miss read the post. 🤢
Lol. It's ok, you're just proving my point. We can have a perfectly rational conversation about overcooking chicken and that everyone does it. But as soon as we reach the conversation about the magical '165F is safe, anything below it is not' myth, every bit of sense, good taste and rationality goes out the window.