Thorough cooking: If chicken, why not duck too?

[spqr]

a new place in Springfield (called "Soiree", contemporary European cuisine, whatever that is)

Whatever contemporary European cuisine may be that duck salad would not be part of it, the only place you'd get stuff like that would be in an American restaurant, and I don't care what it calls its "cuisine"

Sniff sniff. I wouldn't want to over generalize on this issue. I've had many dodgy meals in Europe too.

I don't know who the cook is at this place, or what his/her training is, but whoever it is is stretching his/her competence way beyond its current limits. However, I'm sure that cooking in a small, midwestern U.S. city is equivalent to pitching in the minors (baseball reference, sorry), and there's no way but up from here.

[Rhea_S]

when I described the duck salad he shuddered and said something to the effect that all poultry should be cooked through

Ever try well-done ostrich? It's terrible. It becomes leather.

I'm going with the overprocessing of chicken explanation in combination with the unappetizing appearance and smell of raw chicken.

Where's Soiree?

[ngatti]

Ive eaten a lot of soysauce chicken in Flushing. You know, the ones where the bones are practically bloody. And yet....I still live. :)

Remeber that frozen poultry will have pink boes and give the appearance of being undercooked. Also poussins have bones that stay pink after thorough cooking.

Nick

[=Mark]

Ive eaten a lot of soysauce chicken in Flushing. You know, the ones where the bones are practically bloody. And yet....I still live. :)

This has become a problem at a lot of establishments, particularly BBQ places. The reason that much cooked poultry today retains a pinkish hue is that advances in genetics and nutrition have allowed chickens to be butchered at a much younger age than in the past.

At this stage of their lives many of the bones have not yet fully calcified. As a result, hemogloben contained in the marrow is free to pass into the meat during cooking presenting a pinkish "raw" look to the meat that many folks find unnacceptable. Problem is, you can cook this poultry to death and it will still look uncooked and you can't convince some folks otherwise.

[ngatti]

Thanks Mark. That explains the poussins.

Nick

[spqr]

Where's Soiree?

Springfield, IL, west side of town, in The Gables.

[trillium]

(As for BSE/Jacobs Kruzhowever's, I believe the problem is that the virus is in the cow to begin with, and therefore is dispersed throughout the muscle.  That's why it can be spread through steaks, etc.  Although I would think that thorough cooking would kill the virus, but I don't know.)

BSE/Jacobs Kruzhowever's are caused by a proto viral strand of DNA called a Prion. These prions appear to affect people who have some sort of genetic predisposition to them, causing normal DNA in the nervous system to start to convert to more prions. They behave like a self replicating catalyst, and are not actually considered alive.

I can't help it; I know this isn't exactly food related, but still. A prion is proteinaceous, not nucleic acid based. It's not a proto viral strand of DNA. Proving that is how Stanley Prusiner received his Nobel.

As for chicken vs. duck, there isn't anything that much different about their biology or how they are processed (kill, bleed, remove feathers and guts, etc). Except of course, that we expect to pay 0.69/lb for chicken and we don't for duck. Get it? Market forces drive people to do stuff while processing chickens that should (and is for other stuff besides domestic poultry) be illegal.

If you look at statistics from the CDC re salmonella poisoning, it's interesting to note the majority of reported cases come from eating in restaurants that had raw egg batters lying about. Chickens with salmonella (mostly in the NE of the US) have it in their ovaries. Things could have changed, these were the statistics I looked up a couple of years ago, but I somehow doubt it. Us? We eat raw eggs and what some would call raw chicken with impunity (lots of Asian steamed chicken dishes)...but we buy chickens from people who grow and slaughter them themselves and the eggs are from my mum's back yard. Ground meat? Don't trust it from a shop, so we grind it ourselves. I hate it that the CDC and FDA harps on about cooking your ground meat 'till it's sawdust and handling raw chicken like it's a contaminant in the kitchen (should you really want to be eating something that will supposedly crawl away when your back is turned??) but does nothing to improve regulations for food processing...hell, I'd settle for them enforcing the ones already on the books. Instead they want to start irradiating meats to make them safer. Talk about locking the barn after the horses have left....ok, I'll stop ranting now.

regards,

trillium