Chicken Temperature Safety

The time and temperature guide says, for chicken (light meat), 149 degrees for 1 hour. I thought chicken needs to be at 165 degrees to be fully cooked?

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Brandon_Byrd_40557

Whether or not a food is safe to eat is a matter of both the temperature the food reaches as well as the time at which it remains at that temperature. The 165F recommendation is absurdly high; it's a temperature at which salmonella cannot survive for more than a second. That's overkill. You do not need to cook chicken to that temperature to kill off pathogens, and cooking chicken to that temperature often yields a sad, dried out result that nobody really wants to eat. At 149F, salmonella will still die but the process takes a bit longer (minutes as opposed to seconds). The FDA's guidelines for ready to eat chicken products require that chicken be held for 3.5 minutes at 149F to achieve a 7-log10 reduction of salmonella. That will be achieved if you're cooking the chicken SV for an hour.
The federal government's food safety guidelines (as far as temperature is concerned) are ridiculous and unnecessary. And they often conflict with each other (the FDA and USDA have different recommendations, for example). The first volume of Modernist Cuisine (partly written by ChefSteps co-founder Chris Young) goes through all this material in (almost) excruciating detail. It's probably more than you really want (or need) to know. For the home cook, Doug Baldwin (who now also works at ChefSteps) has a fantastic website that has everything you'd want to know about pathogens, pasteurization, and food safety when cooking sous vide.

matthewmicahhall

Hi there -- it is important to note the difference between "safe to eat" versus what you consider to be cooked. There are multiple resources out there on this topic, but I will give props to the ChefSteps team and refer you to the Safety section of Doug Balwdin's primer on low temperature cooking. Also check out Table 4.1 that provides pasteurization times for poultry as a function of thickness and cooking temperature.

The 165 F guideline that you are citing was designed to minimize risk as much as possible. However, I would encourage you to do the experiment 149 F experiment using low temp cooking techniques -- I think you will be pleased with the results.

Mike_VT_416870

Awesome, thanks for the information. I'm reading about all this now.

Mike_VT_416870

Thanks for the response!

fisher23

Hi Mike, I hope you will take the time to learn about sous vide. ChefSteps has a great basic class that you can take for free. Douglas Baldwin, PhD has a great website too. Sous vide is based on pasteurization so your safe temperatures will be different. It's like with pasteurizing milk, you can do that at high temperatures for a few seconds or at 145 F for 30 minutes. Your chicken will be safe to eat if it is held at 149 for a long enough time to pasteurize it, where as by other cooking methods you need to bring it to 165 F for a few seconds to get a product safe enough to eat.

Martin_411586

...meaning you could eat chicken safely (!) at medium instead of the well done you're used to. If you've successfully grasped this concept, you're there (safety-wise) !