Step away from the sink, and no one will get hurt.
You don't need to wash your turkey before you roast it, and doing so can be dangerous. A British study found that washing poultry in the sink can spray bacteria up to 3 feet away. And with one in 50 turkeys contaminated with salmonella, according to estimates from Department of Agriculture food-safety inspectors, you don't want a mist of turkey juice on your relish platter.
Salmonella bacteria can cause salmonellosis, with symptoms of diarrhea, fever and abdominal cramps developing 12 to 72 hours after infection. The illness usually lasts four to seven days.
Given this contamination rate, the chef's job is to keep the raw turkey juices away from anything that isn't going to be cooked to 165 degrees, the temperature required to kill disease-causing bugs. Unfortunately, too many people start their feast preparations by plopping their turkey in the sink and giving it a good wash.
There's no need to do that. It's a holdover from long ago when poultry routinely arrived with bits of blood and pinfeathers still attached. Cooks were instructed to wash the carcass well and use tweezers to remove any feathers that didn't get plucked. With today's modern processing, none of that is necessary. You just want to get the turkey into its pan and into the oven with as little dripping and splashing as possible.
"The heat will take care of whatever might be on the surface of the turkey," says Howard Seltzer, national education adviser for the Food and Drug Administration's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition.
"The magic number is 165," he says. "Stick the thermometer into the breast and then both thighs, and make sure that that bird is 165 throughout."
That, of course, requires a meat thermometer, preferably one of the newer instant-read thermometers. They're usually for sale near the turkeys at the supermarket.
You, of course, thawed the turkey in the refrigerator, not in a sink of warm water, didn't you? Even though it took three or four days. If you didn't and you're staring at 15 pounds of frozen gobbler, don't plop it in a sink full of hot water to thaw. The biocontamination possibilities give food-safety experts the heebie-jeebies.
Embrace the frozenness of your bird and consider the methods available for roasting a frozen turkey. You can go online and find out how.
If it's a lack of refrigerator space that's impeding your thawing, Doug Powell, a food-safety scientist at Kansas State University, notes that in any Northern climate, you can simply put the turkey outside in the garage in a closed cooler to keep out pets and vermin. His department wrote a paper on the topic and found that as long as the temperature is below 40 to 45 degrees, it's perfectly safe.
Then there's the big question of whether it's safe to lick the beaters when you're making dessert. According to the Food and Drug Administration, about one in 20,000 eggs are contaminated with Salmonella enteritidis, the most common type of illness-causing salmonella.
Benjamin Chapman, a professor of food safety at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, says he's content to "let others make their own risk decisions."
But for himself and his family, the answer is no.
Safe Turkey Tips
You want to keep the raw turkey juices away from anything that isn't going to be cooked to 165 degrees, the temperature required to kill disease-causing bugs.
But don't bother to wash the turkey before cooking -- the heat will take care of whatever's on the surface of the bird.
Use an instant-read thermometer in the breast and both thighs to check for doneness.
If you have forgotten to thaw your turkey, there are still safe ways to roast it.
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