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Food Focus June 2009

New recipe for cooking poultry

For years NZFSA has been advising consumers not to be chicken about meat safety. Heat kills harmful bacteria, so it is important that meat and poultry is properly cooked to avoid getting sick from any bugs that might be on the raw meat. NZFSA has recently reviewed and lowered the temperature it advises people cook poultry to. The recommendation is now 75°C.

NZFSA’s principal microbiology advisor Roger Cook says this new advice has come out of a comprehensive study looking at the heat sensitivity of Campylobacter and the time/temperature combinations needed to kill off the bacteria.

“Campylobacter is just a normal everyday bug and so it is easy to kill off. But because chicken consists of lots of muscle bundles and there are different crevices that the bacteria can get into and hide in, people have said ‘maybe we need to increase the temperature it needs to be cooked to so we are absolutely certain bacteria are killed off’.”

Over the years people involved with food safety have adopted this precautionary approach and added a safety margin by increasing the recommended temperature by a few degrees. Dr Cook says that although it is widely acknowledged that undercooked chicken is one factor leading to campylobacteriosis in New Zealand, recommending a cooking temperature that is higher than necessary doesn’t give consumers extra protection; it merely leads to overcooking.

The study on recommended cooking temperatures has also looked at how to kill off other harmful bacteria commonly found in meat and poultry, such as Listeria, Salmonella and E. coli O157:H7.

While the recommended cooking temperature for poultry has changed, NZFSA’s other safety tips remain the same:

• Always defrost poultry in the fridge and not the bench where harmful bacteria can multiply quickly.

• Place raw poultry in the bottom of the fridge, where juices won’t leak on to and contaminate other foods.

• To get an accurate reading of the temperature, use a meat thermometer. Insert it into the breast, which is the thickest part of the bird, taking care not to touch the bone.

• When cooking a stuffed chicken or turkey, the centre of the stuffing must reach 75°C.