Whether it’s grilled, baked or fried, many people love to savor the juicy delights of burgers, chicken and other popular meats. Not surprisingly, there are a lot of popular myths out there about the right way to prepare and cook that meat.
Here are three of the top meat myths that are not only destroying flavor…but making you sick:
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Eating pink pork will make you sick.
Once upon a time this may have been true as there was a fear of ingesting an ugly parasite named trichinosis. Cooking pork to a safe, but gray interior temperature of 160 degrees would kill off trichinosis — but who would want to eat that dried up chop?
Today, government standards have all but eliminated the risk of trichinosis contamination from pork. According to the Center for Disease Control, between the years of 1997 through 2001, the average reported cases of trichinosis was twelve.
So go ahead and go for a slightly rosy hue. Cook pork chops or loin roasts until they register an internal temperature of 140 to 145. And be sure to let the pork rest for 10 minutes or so-the internal temperature will continue to rise 5 to 10 degrees, but the meat will still be beautifully moist.
Always rinse off poultry that comes from the supermarket.
It’s probably been pounded into your brain that you should unwrap that poultry and give it a good rinse in the sink.
But guess what? You’re most likely splashing all of those surface pathogens all over your sink, faucet, and surrounding area, which can potentially increase your risk of ingesting them. You’re better off just cooking the poultry to a safe internal temperature (165 degrees for the breast meat and 175 for the thigh meat).
You should always remove chicken skin before eating.
Actually, you can enjoy a skin-on chicken breast without blowing your sat-fat budget.
Half the pleasure of eating roast chicken comes from the gloriously crisp, brown skin that seems to melt in your mouth. Yet the skinless, boneless chicken breast—one of the more boring protein sources on Earth—became the health-conscious cook’s gold standard somewhere along the way. Fortunately, the long-standing command to strip poultry of its skin before eating doesn’t hold up under a nutritional microscope. A 12-ounce bone-in, skin-on chicken breast half contains just 2.5 grams of saturated fat and 50 calories more than its similarly portioned skinless counterpart.
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