ByLeah Worthington
Published December 22, 2023
Beejhy Barhany has been cooking for as long as she can remember. Growing up in an Ethiopian-Jewish community in Israel meant helping family in the kitchen, learning their recipes, and absorbing their customs.
Now a chef and owner of Tsion Café in Harlem, New York, Barhany continues to pull from culinary traditions, including one that has become the source of much controversy in recent decades: washing raw meat before cooking.
The question of whether or not to wash meat has long pitted safety recommendations against tradition. While experts including those from the CDC adamantly advise against it, warning that the practice can inadvertently spread rather than remove pathogens, others simply see it as custom.
For Barhany, submerging raw chicken in salt and lemon water is both functional and ceremonial, as soaking meat in salt is required by Jewish Kosher rules. “No matter what they say, I’m going to continue washing my chicken,” Barhany says. “This is something that’s been done for millennia.”
Barhany is hardly alone. Despite ongoing campaigns from the USDA that discourage people from washing meat, surveys show that a majority of consumers remain unaware of the advice—or simply choose to ignore it. “The recommendation has been around since at least 2005 by USDA,” says Shauna Henley, a senior family and consumer sciences educator at the University of Maryland. “It’s still a hot topic.”
So, what’s the deal with washing meat? Food scientists and culinary professionals weigh in on the origins of this practice and why it persists.
The science of washing meat
When it comes to washing raw meat, the experts are clear: Don’t do it. Rather than reducing the risk of foodborne illness, washing meat increases the likelihood of spreading unwanted pathogens, like salmonella and campylobacter, around the kitchen.
“Washing meat before cooking is not really helping,” says Betty Feng, associate professor of food science at Purdue University. “The only thing it does [is] splash and could cross-contaminate a lot of your kitchen items—your sink, probably your clothes, whatever you have by the sink.”
Indeed, research has shown that pathogens can be transferred through the splashing of contaminated water droplets, such as when rinsing meat under a running faucet. “Bacteria can’t jump, they can’t move,” says Jennifer Quinlan, a professor of nutrition sciences at Drexel University. “But once you introduce water, you’re giving them a way to move.”
A 2022 study showed that submerging meat in a bowl of water reduced the splashing but not the spread of germs. Observing participants during meal preparation, researchers also found higher levels of E. coli in the sink than on the surrounding countertops—regardless of whether people did or didn’t wash their chicken. However, the concentration of E. coli was higher where chicken was washed.
“I would treat the entire sink basin just like the outside of the chicken—it’s a biological hazard,” says Benjamin Chapman, one of the study authors and associate professor in North Carolina State University’s agricultural and human sciences department.
In some cultures, soaking or rinsing uncooked meat in salt water and acid—such as lemon juice or vinegar—is a common form of “washing.”
For instance, when preparing pollo guisado, Nelson German, a Dominican-American chef says it’s traditional to wash the chicken with more than water. “You take a bitter orange, sour orange, lemon, or lime, and you just kind of rub all over the chicken.”
Though this procedure is thought to clean and impart flavor, only half is true. Feng cautions against using saltwater, vinegar, or lemon juice, which simply aren’t strong enough to effectively kill foodborne pathogens. “If the acidity is high enough to kill bacteria, then it’s not really likely you can use your bare hand to wash,” she says.
Ultimately, the experts are adamant that washing raw meat simply isn’t worth the risk.
“The way that we make meat safe is through cooking, not through the removal of pathogens,” Chapman says. “The heat is doing like 10,000 times more killing than rinsing.”
Why some people wash meat
Washing meat likely originated in cultures around the world as a way to get rid of the inedible material left on freshly slaughtered meat, says Kathleen Glass, associate director of the Food Research Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Before industrialized food processing (and today in communities that still butcher their own meat), washing was an important line of defense against dirt, animal debris, and perhaps also the host of pathogens that live in raw meat.
“I grew up on a farm, and we slaughtered our own chickens and beef and pork. And [washing] was part of the slaughtering process,” she says.
But over time, these safety precautions have become codified and passed down as culinary tradition, some making their way into modern American kitchens. Even with industrial meatpacking processes—including strict cleaning standards—meat washing persists around the country. A 2015 survey of over 1,500 U.S. consumers found that nearly 70 percent rinse or wash their poultry before cooking it.
Quinlan, who conducted formative research into consumer meat handling practices, says that, for some, it’s a matter of personal taste. With poultry, for instance, “some people just don’t like the goo,” she says. But she and her fellow researchers were surprised to find that a majority of people, of all cultures and backgrounds, wash meat simply because that’s how they were raised.
“We saw that whether you’re white, Black, Asian, Hispanic, Latina, it didn’t matter,” says Henley, a food scientist and one of Quinlan’s collaborators. “Everyone was really washing poultry to some extent.”
Family, tradition, and habit
For some, washing meat has become deeply ingrained in the preparation of particular dishes. Ji Hye Kim, chef and owner of Miss Kim in Ann Arbor, Michigan, describes the practice as an integral part of Korean cooking, particularly when preparing stews and broths. She learned from watching her mother that washing would remove impurities “to get really clean tasting stews or a clear stock.”
Sanitizing the work area is also a critical part of the process. German associates the practice to fears around disease and distrust of medical systems. “Caribbean moms are clean as hell. They’re afraid of every microbe, every virus,” he says, laughing.
Some Chinese cuisine, too, calls for specific meat prep. When making fried chicken wings, for instance, chef and food content creator Jon Kung describes a multi-step cleaning process that includes removing any feathers or other debris and scrubbing the wings under running water.
Kung learned the practice from his elders in Hong Kong, where much of their meat came freshly slaughtered from wet markets and would need to be cleansed of any lingering animal debris. “You could call it a cultural practice, but it is rooted in pragmatism,” he says.
It was also pragmatic for Sarah Kirnon, a West Indian chef and former owner of Miss Ollie’s in Oakland, California. Like many others living in Barbados in the 1970s, she didn’t have refrigeration, so it was common to immediately salt and wash fresh meat—a practice she continues today.
“It’s salted. We either add a cup of vinegar or limes—it’s rubbed into the meat, and then it’s washed,” she says. “These things are just ingrained in us. It’s what we do.”
Quinlan believes that educating people about safety precautions is important and has been involved in several nationwide campaigns warning against washing meat. But she doesn’t want to encroach on people’s traditions. “I’m not going to tell those people, don’t do your cultural preparation. I am going to say you don’t need to wash it for safety purposes.”
After years living and cooking in the U.S., particularly in professional kitchens which are governed by strict USDA guidelines, many chefs have abandoned the taboo meat washing practice. But not everyone has let go entirely.
Nik Sharma, a molecular biologist turned chef and cookbook author, says that washing meat was standard practice in India where he grew up. “When I grew up, we never bought chickens pre-cleaned or pre-cut from the grocery store,” he says. “So, in that sense, it’s always been critical for me to wash it.” In his food and recipe writing, Sharma never recommends washing meat and has mostly stopped doing so himself. But he still sometimes finds himself giving chicken a quick, cleansing soak in a bowl.
German says he’s learned to adapt his methods in professional settings where he works with cooks from all different cultural backgrounds. “As chefs we’re challenged to keep our traditions alive and still do things in a safe way,” he says. But he still washes and salts certain types of meat while cooking at home, a practice that is less about sanitation than about staying connected to his roots.
“At home, you can do whatever you want,” he says. “Those traditions, I think, will always last.”
Online, it’s easy to find less-than-civil discussions over this topic.
Often, the criticism from both sides of the debate seems coded—a way to “consider the culture or the cuisine lesser than, dirty, or unclean for any reason,” Kung says. “Washing your meat, or not washing your meat, is not a moral failing.”
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