Keep your holiday foods safe
From Thanksgiving through the New Year is the time for leaning toward tradition. This is when many of us plan for a number of small elegant get-togethers or the one big party we host all year, when we tackle some ‘real’ cooking once again.
The festive holiday season inspires us to spruce up the house, contact friends we haven’t seen in a while and call in the family. We also begin sorting through our recipe collection and other sources for fresh ideas to add to the traditional turkey and dressing fare.
As our focus quickly switches from pumpkins, pilgrims and cornucopias to bows, tree ornaments and gift wrappings, don’t forget about the correct handling of your feast and its leftovers.
For as long as we’ve been having Thanksgiving celebrations, we’ve been looking for ways to save time with the fixings. We’ve defrosted the bird on the counter, prestuffed, slow-baked, partially cooked and stored whole without carving.
Read on to see if you may unknowingly be creating any of these scenarios.
When you look at the happy faces gathered around your holiday table, think about this – nearly one in five of the people you see could face special risks from food poisoning. You can cut those risks, protecting yourself and your family, by taking simple precautions in the kitchen.
In my recipe file, I’ve still got a copy of Mother’s directions for cooking the big Thanksgiving bird in a brown grocery bag that was suggested by a guest chef on a television feature spot. Rather than getting up at the crack of dawn, it proposed cooking the turkey all night at a low 200-degree temperature. As a bonus the family could wake up in the morning to the scent of roasting turkey.
Now, we’re being told this method is not safe. Toxins from glue in the brown bag and bacteria accumulation from low cooking temperatures could make you sick. Instead, we should use cooking bags made for roasting purposes and set the oven at 325 degrees. Thorough cooking kills bacteria but cooking at low temperatures – less that 325 degrees – has the opposite effect. The warmth of the low heat actually helps bacteria grow.
It’s okay to prestuff Christmas stockings, but not Thanksgiving birds! Stuffing the night before is risky business because the cavity of the bird actually insulates the stuffing from the cold temperatures.
According to the USDA’s meat and poultry hotline experts, one of the riskiest things people do is something they’ve done for decades – leave cooked turkey out all day. It sits on the counter, it sits on the table. People pick at it after dinner and there it sits for hours with bacteria doubling every 20 minutes in the right conditions.
Some time-savers are safer than others. Partially cooking a turkey is not one of them. Cooking the turkey a day or two before the holiday is fine, but refrigerating the bird whole, without carving, is another form of turkey jeopardy.
The sliced turkey can be reheated for serving if you arrange it in shallow baking pans, place in a conventional oven or microwave, and make sure the meat and stuffing are reheated to “steamy hot” 165 degrees.
So here’s the food safety rule – two hours after you pulled the cooked turkey from the oven it should be back in the refrigerator. To speed cooling and limit bacteria growth, cut the meat from the bone, remove the stuffing and store both in small, shallow containers.