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Let’s say you’re making a delicious chicken salad, like maybe ourPopcorn Chicken Salad. You’d want to get started on cooking the chicken first, so maybe you’ll trim the thighs you picked out at the grocery store or cut your chicken tenders into bite-size pieces. Once your chicken is air-frying, baking or sizzling on the stovetop, you’ll put your cutting board in the sink and give your hands a good scrub before getting out your favorite salad ingredients. Sounds simple enough, but a new study from North Carolina State University found that 25% of home cooks end up contaminating their salad with raw poultry.
The study,published in theJournal of Food Protection, was conceived as a way to assess the impact of washing raw chicken on contamination in the kitchen. But in the end, the researchers found that 25% of the 300 participating cooks contaminated their food, including cooks who didn’t wash their chicken before cooking.
Why You Shouldn’t Wash Your Chicken Before You Cook It
Since both groups—those who washed the chicken and those who didn’t—ended up with similar levels of contamination in their salads, researchers suggest that how people clean up between preparing the chicken and preparing the salad could be the real culprit.
“We think the salad contamination stems from people doing a poor job of washing their hands after handling the raw chicken, and/or doing a poor job of sanitizing the sink and surrounding surfaces before rinsing or handling the salad,” study author Ellen Shumaker, Ph.D.,said in a media release.
To measure the contamination, researchers inoculated the chicken with a traceable but harmless strain of bacteria. While they expected to find traces of the bacteria on the surfaces surrounding the sink—at least after some cooks washed their chicken—they instead mostly found the bacteria in the sink itself.
Can You Refreeze Chicken?
It may sound like a headache to disinfect your sink after cooking raw meat every time, but keeping your kitchen nice and clean will help you avoid foodborne illnesses in the long run. Just be sure to correctlywash up your cutting boardand take care of your kitchen sponges, too.
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