I have washed chicken under the tap my entire adult life because that is what I was taught at home, and apparently the advice is now the opposite. What I cannot tell is which of these kitchen and household rules are real and which are just repeated. I am after the ones with an actual reason behind them, not the ones people say because their mother said it.
The single change that did more than all the rules combined was a probe thermometer. Poultry is done at a temperature, not at a colour or a time, and once you can see the number you stop guessing and stop overcooking everything into cardboard out of fear. Twelve quid, and it settled about six kitchen arguments.
I washed chicken for two decades and my kitchen had a bad week once that I could never trace to anything. No proof it was that, and I am not claiming there was, but I stopped and I stopped worrying at the same time. Sometimes the cheap habit change is worth it just for that.
While we are here, the wooden chopping board scare is the one that turned out backwards. The received wisdom was that wood harbours bacteria in the grain and plastic is safer, and the work that has been done on it suggests wood is at least as good in practice, partly because plastic boards get deep knife scars that never really clean. I still keep a separate board for raw meat, but not because it is plastic.
So the separate board is the point and the material mostly is not. That is the reverse of what I was taught at home.
Every kitchen I worked in used wood for nearly everything and colour coded plastic for raw meat, purely so nobody could mix the boards up by accident.
Rinsing rice is a completely different thing and gets caught up in this by accident. That is about starch and texture, not safety, so keep doing it. The rule is really about raw meat and splash, not about washing food in general.
The genuinely useless rules I have dropped: rinsing mushrooms ruins them, searing seals in juices, and adding oil to pasta water stops it sticking. None of them survive five minutes of paying attention.
@skillet_sara · 3w ago · 3 replies
The chicken one is real and the reason is splash, not the chicken. Water hitting a wet surface throws droplets a surprising distance onto taps, worktops and whatever is drying on the rack, and food agencies on both sides of the Atlantic have been telling people to stop for years now. Cooking is what makes it safe, so pat it dry with kitchen paper and get it in the pan. If you have been doing it for twenty years, the fix is one habit and no equipment.
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@wind_down_wren · 3w ago
And the drying rack. Mine lived next to the sink for years with clean plates on it, which in hindsight was the actual problem.
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@curious_wren · 3w ago
So the risk is the sink area rather than the bird. That reframes it completely, thank you.
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