In the kitchen, there are dos and don’ts, and no way in hells. I will state this unequivocally with neither fear nor apprehension: Do not wash your chicken.
Please don’t take me for an inflexible kitchen know-it-all. I’m just a (fairly) humble food director, one who carries the emotional scars of being laid low in college by something I prefer not to unearth in my thoughts. To put it gently, the experience was…unforgettable. The perp? Salmonella.
What Are The Dangers Of Washing Your Chicken?
Picture this: Let’s say you take that chicken over to the sink. Give it a water shower. Sensible, right? Thing is, you may as well be grabbing billions (trillions, squillions?) of disease-causing bacteria and tossing them around to other surfaces in your kitchen like confetti. At some point, luck is going to lose. And guaranteed, at some point (say, after 8 hours or so), someone’s going down.
Yes, water is effective at cleaning, but cleaning is NOT the same as disinfecting. Water also happens to be quite skilled at dispersing ghastly, merciless things undetected by human eyes. Imagine your eyes were microscopes—what you would see would deliver an existential shock to your core.
So, Why Do People Wash Their Chicken?
Way back when, in the era before supermarkets and mass production, it was customary to clean your chickens; all that plucking and cleaning was obviously a must. (Think of all those feathers and fragments.) In some cultures to this day, “rinsing” your chicken with an acid, such as lime juice, is commonly done.
Being raised by Jamaicans, I know this. I understand the trauma of colonialism/subjugation and its corollary: a deep distrust of the “system.” These concerns aren’t necessarily unfounded—think about the horrors of industrial meat processing in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. But we’ve come a long way from the disease-ridden stockyards of the early 20th century.
There’s nothing wrong with scrubbing chicken with citrus, but an acid wash is a useless, woeful weapon against insidious characters such as the aforementioned Salmonella and its diabolical comrade, Campylobacter.
What Do The Experts Say?
Don’t trust me? Here’s a sobering find: The CDC estimates that Salmonella causes about 1.4 million cases of foodborne illness annually in the United States. And the USDA has released plenty of information that bolsters the don’t-wash advice.
Do not let intuition or convention send you careening down the wrong path. Let science be your guiding light, your muse. The best way to protect yourself against harmful bacteria? Simply cook your chicken, which I’m guessing you would do anyway. Heat will quickly dispatch all those evil particles. Washing chicken with water is just insane. You’re also wasting time and paper towels, by the way.
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