safe low temperature offal/organ cooking

I eat offal (mostly beef kidney and liver several times a week, others in a blue moon- tripe, brain) and would like to have it minimally cooked (if cooking for myself this would be fine: "probably dangerous-bacteria free, guaranteed parasite(fluke, tapeworm, trichinella) free"). For safety I've been "cooking the h*ll out of it" for many years- at least a half hour in my pressure cooker. I'm suspecting this is overkill

Is there a resource for time/temperature settings for getting these meats safe? All the resources I've seen focus on muscle meats - fish, poultry, pork or beef -there's little that explicitly lists on the table or graph "organ meats" or offal.

Is it true that if the dangerous bacteria are "gone" (D-6) then the parasites are too?

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Brendan_Lee_56950

Modernist Cuisine recommends 56C (to core, so you'll have to monitor the temp with a probe) for mammal kidney's so that would include your beef kidneys, pork kidneys, etc. This is for a pink product, for a medium doneness they recommend 60C for 1h. And if i'm reading the tables correctly, both temperatures should be 6.5D after an hours time.

I personally wouldn't really want minimally cooked tripe, long and super soft is my preferred texture.

Freshness is key with offal, I'm fortunate enough to live around a sizable asian and latin community that these products are always fresh so i don't worry too much but when in doubt pasteurization wouldn't hurt.

Tim_Roth_78505

I can't imagine there being a significant difference in the safety of things like kidneys compared to muscle tissue. In general, unless the animal died of an infection related to the offal of interest, any organs apart from the intestines or stomach shouldn't hold any significantly higher level of bacteria compared to normal meat (muscle tissue). There could be other cooking considerations given that the types of compounds in organs can differ (liver being the one that immediately comes to mind), but this wouldn't be about pasteurization (i.e. killing bacteria). As an example, prions associated with neurodegenerative diseases like Mad Cow are located in nervous tissue, and you won't really be able to cook those out.

As for the parasites, it probably depends on the specific parasite of interest. I know, for example, that some species of Trichinella can be effectively killed by freezing, whereas others cannot. The cooking thresholds for preventing the most common form of trichinosis, though, seem to all be lower than those required for pasteurization (wikipedia has a USDA chart about this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichinosis). Again, though, this only applies to specific species of Trichinella, so if you're cooking with wild game or other non-standard meats, I'd err on the side of caution and cook higher for longer. The USDA tends to have a lot of good resources for this, though, so you might have more luck searching on their site for specific meat-associated parasites and how to cook them out. My guess, though, is that your intuition is correct about pasteurization times and temps being effective for most parasites.

sanjeev_k_sharma_14083

thanks for the responses folks, I'm eager to start cooking at lower temperatures @ tasting more.

> a significant difference in the safety of things like kidneys compared to muscle tissue

yeah, no bacteria that I know of but I'm no expert.

Other than bacteria there's other stuff, like the BSE agent you listed- just for another example pork can have far more active hepatitis particles in the liver than other tissues, and hep E virus specifically seems to be able to survive at least a little higher temperature than bacteria

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18166239

I'm miffed they only seem to have tested two temperatures though