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PeerInfinity comments on Procedural Knowledge Gaps - Less Wrong
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I think I have lots of gaps to report, but I'm having lots of trouble trying to write a coherent comment about them... so I'm going to just report this trouble as a gap, for now.
Oh, and I also have lots of trouble even noticing these gaps. I have a habit of avoiding doing things that I haven't already established as "safe". Unfortunately, this often results in gaps continuing to be not detected or corrected.
Anyway, the first gap that comes to mind is... I don't dare to cook anything that involves handling raw meat, because I'm afraid that I lack the knowledge necessary to avoid giving myself food poisoning. Maybe if I tried, I would be able to do it with little or no problem, but I don't dare to try.
Short tip: If the raw meat smells or tastes bad, don't eat it.
Longer tip: the reason there are so many raw meat warnings are not because you will get sick from eating or handling raw meat. If you don't have a clogged nose, there is almost no way for you to get sick from raw meat, because you will smell or taste any problems before you swallow it.
What's NOT safe is mxing raw and cooked foods. The safety warnings are because the same bacteria that will make raw foods smell bad, will not produce the same smell warnings in the cooked food. This means that you can have highly-contaminated cooked food that gives off no warning whatsoever, and get terribly sick from it.
I have eaten raw meat -- including raw chicken and raw eggs -- for many years, and had fewer incidences of stomach upset with them than I have had with cooked foods. The worst reaction I ever had to a raw food was when I ate a bad egg raw, that was too cold for me to properly taste or smell. (I vomited it up a few minutes later, when some less-impaired part of my body detected the problem.)
Since then, I prefer to keep fresh eggs unrefrigerated, and find they keep for around two weeks at room temperature.
So, bear in mind that the mere presence of harmful organisms in food doesn't mean they'll make you sick, in and of themselves. Cooking and sterilization are evolutionarily modern inventions, and we've only known about the existence of germs for the last 100 years or so.
We can therefore trust that our genes will encode reflexive and intuitive responses to food that is actually harmful, provided that it was found in the ancestral environment. This means that we can easily tell with our senses when a raw and unprocessed food is unsafe to eat. It's the prepared stuff you need to be careful with!
In other words, raw meat is plenty safe to handle and eat. Just keep it away from your cooked food, as the cooked food not only has its residual defenses destroyed (no intact cell walls, etc.) but also will not show any signs that it has been contaminated until well after you eat it.
Food poisoning, btw, is less bad the earlier your body detects the problem. If you somehow manage to eat something raw that's bad, you may throw it up before it even reaches your stomach, or within the first few minutes of getting it there. But cooked food poisoning usually doesn't get detected until the food is at least into the small intestine, and it's much worse down there.
(Really, if you're worried about cooking raw meat, you're much better off just eating the raw meat as-is!)
I used to be a semi-frequent raw egg consumer. I figured that risks should be rather low. However, once I did get food poisoning, and it was such an excessively bad experience that I decided that I'm avoiding even small risks from raw food consumption.
Just out of curiosity, what were the specific circumstances? Were the eggs refigerated? Mixed with other items? Or eaten warm and plain with nothing else?
I ate two raw eggs along with maybe a cup of whipping cream and two-three pieces of vegetable, for breakfast. I'm fairly confident it was the eggs. First symptoms occurred only about 5 hours later, after I'd eaten a moderate amount of other food whose composition I can't recall. Eggs were at most 5 days old, and spent that time refrigerated. They may have spent at most one day left out of refrigerator. They were eaten cold.
Since coming out of the store, or the chicken? ;-)
As a comparison point, I usually store eggs at room temperature with a high probability of still being good 2 weeks after getting them from the farmer. (Don't know how old they are before that point, or how they're stored, though they usually seem pretty cold when I get them.)
I never eat them raw except at room temperature, and never without smelling them before adding them to something else (like a smoothie or other recipe).
In my experience, you're lucky to notice a problem with a cold egg even if you intentionally smell it, and you don't mention having smelled it.
I am a bit surprised by this. The one time I had a nasty reaction to a cold egg it only took 5 minutes. On the other hand, it wasn't mixed with anything else at all, so maybe that's a factor.
Store.
Wiki says: "The delay between consumption of a contaminated food and appearance of the first symptoms of illness is called the incubation period. This ranges from hours to days depending on the agent, and on how much was consumed. If symptoms occur within 1–6 hours after eating the food, it suggests that it is caused by a bacterial toxin or a chemical rather than live bacteria."
I can't smell.
Generally, it is mainly chicken that one needs to be careful about, because it is sometimes contaminated with unhealthy bacteria, even when bought "fresh". A general procedure with all meat, and especially chicken, is to wash any surface that raw chicken comes in contact with when you are done preparing it and have started to cook it, then wash any utensils you used that touched the chicken, and wash you hands. To be extra cautious, you can do that for any raw meat. Raw meat should be refrigerated soon after purchase and now allowed to stand uncooked at room temperature for more than the time it takes to prepare it.
Thanks for explaining that! But, um... I still have more questions... What is the procedure for washing the surfaces, the utensils, and my hands? How do I know when the meat is cooked enough to not qualify as raw? And for stir-frying raw meat, do I need to pause the stir-frying process to wash the stir-frying utensils, so that I don't contaminate the cooked food with any raw juices that happen to still be on the utensils?
Salmonella bacteria is killed instantly at 165°F. Cooking small chopped or sliced pieces of meat is hard to do wrong because the surface area to volume ratio is high enough that they will be sterilized even before they start to appear cooked. Make your slices less than 1/2 inch thick and cook them until they start to turn golden brown. As long as the business ends of your utensils are in contact with the food as it cooks they will be sterilized along with it.
Assuming that you already know how to wash things in general, you don't need to do it any differently. Normal washing is good enough because bacteria can't grow without a source of nutrients and moisture, and you need to ingest a fairly substantial amount of bacteria in order to get sick.
This is true, but it probably helps to state explicitly that a) the even for small pieces of meat the inside might not be at 165 F even if the outside is (so make sure that it is hot for a fair bit of time) b) This is more of an issue for larger pieces of meat (luminosity's comment below is relevant).
There's a related issue: if the meat is raw and frozen, life will be much easier if you defrost it before cooking it. Weird things can happen if you try to directly cook large bits of frozen meat. Generally it won't result in health problems, but it does make stuff more likely to be burned in part or simply not taste good.
However, I find it much easier to slice meat for stir-frying which is still partially frozen. (This also speeds the thawing process.) Probably if you use a cleaver or other heavy, extremely sharp type of instrument, no prior thawing would be necessary; but I don't trust myself with those.
We should add that soapy water does not kill the bacteria, but rather makes it impossible for them to adhere to anything, so they get washed down the drain.
Washing bacteria down the drain is certainly the primary purpose for using soap, by far, but surfactants like soap also kill a few bacteria by lysis (disruption of the cell membrane, causing the cells to rapidly swell with water and burst). In practice, this is so minor it's not worth paying attention to: bacteria have a surrounding cell wall made of a sugar-protein polymer that resists surfactants (among other things), dramatically slowing down the process to the point that it's not practical to make use of it.
(Some bacteria are more vulnerable to surfactant lysis than others. Gram-negative bacteria have a much thinner cell wall, which is itself surrounded by a second, more exposed membrane. But gram-positive bacteria have a thick wall with nothing particularly vulnerable on the outside, and even with gram-negative bacteria the scope of the effect is minor.)
In practice, the big benefit of soap is (#1) washing away oils, especially skin oils, and (#2) dissolving the biofilms produced by the bacteria to anchor themselves to each other and to biological surfaces (like skin and wooden cutting boards). Killing the bacteria directly with soap is a distant third priority.
For handwashing, hot water is in a similar boat: even the hottest water your hands can stand is merely enough to speed up surfactant action, not to kill bacteria directly. For cleaning inanimate surfaces, sufficiently hot water is quite effective at killing bacteria, but most people's hot water only goes up to 135°F or thereabouts, which is not scaldingly hot enough to do the job instantly.
For directly killing bacteria via non-heat means, alcohol and bleach are both far more effective than soap. Alcohol very rapidly strips off the cell wall and triggers immediate lysis, while bleach acts both as a saponifier (it turns fatty acids into soap) and a strong oxidizer (directly attacking the chemical structure of the cell wall and membrane, ripping it apart like a rapid-action biological parallel to rusting iron).
Fun trivia: your hand feels slippery or "bleachy" after handling bleach (or any reasonably strong base) because the outermost layer of your skin has been converted into soap.
I formulated this hypothesis on my own, but I have not seen evidence to back this up. I think a misunderstanding of this process has lead to the profusion of anti-bacterial soaps, which may be breeding hard-to-kill bacteria.
Those who are concerned may be interested to know that Ivory Liquid Hand Soap (and, in all the stores I've visited lately, no other) is a brand of liquid soap which contains no antibacterial ingredients.
Furthermore, it at least used to have a slogan like "so gentle you can even use it on your face" — and it does not have the warning “keep out of eyes” that, as far as I know, all antibacterial soaps have — and I do in fact use it as a face and body wash.
I'm not much of a stir-fryer, but my general method for meat cooking is to have separate utensils for "before cooking" and "during-to-after". So if I put the meat in the pan with a fork, that fork goes to the sink. But the wooden spoon that is cooked with the meat doesn't get washed until I'm done eating, and is usually used as my serving spoon, too. If you are really concerned for safety, you could always use one cooking spoon until the surface of the meat is obviously brown, then switch to a fresh spoon.
If dealing with a low-fat meat (like moose), burger is much easier to cook than other meat, and is still healthy. It is hard to overcook, and easy to tell what's safe, because all the little chunks of meat go from red to dark brown. High fat burger (like cow) is still tasty and easy to cook, but not terribly healthy.
One trick that I will immediately adopt is using an infrared thermometer to check for the 165F that saturn mentioned. Thanks for the info!
For cooking larger pieces of meat than saturn addresses, the way I learnt what was and wasn't needed was simply cooking meat, waiting until the outside looked cooked, then taking a piece out and cutting it in half. You'll be able to see if it's still bloody inside, or if it's chicken you'll be able to see if it's turned white yet. Personally I prefer meat entirely cooked, but depending on your taste pinkish in the middle should be fine.
Doing this over time has given me a good feel for how long to cook meat for my preferences, though even now I still often slice pieces open to be sure.
For beef, not chicken.
This is good for getting a feel for how long to cook meat, but it also dries the meat out to some degree as you cook it. This is especially relevant for cooking steak, IMHO. For things like hamburgers, a simple meat thermometer will do the trick (brown both sides and cook until the inside is 165*F). For steak, it's more difficult if you prefer your meat cooked less than medium-well.
This is one of the things I struggled with a bit when first learning to cook for myself as well. It may help to keep in mind that some meats are safer than others. My heuristic goes roughly: chicken < pork < beef/lamb < fish, in increasing order of safety. If I'm handling raw chicken, I'll wash my hands and utensils thoroughly in warm soapy water before doing anything else. If I'm handling fish, I'll usually just give my hands a quick rinse. The same ordering also applies roughly to doneness; it's a much bigger problem to have undercooked chicken than beef, for example.
A good starting place for meats is braised dishes like stews and pot roasts, because the typically long cooking time makes it hard to accidentally undercook something while still producing tasty results (as opposed to e.g. a steak grilled until it turns into shoe leather).
Also it should be noted that ground meats are not as safe as meat that is whole. A steak doesn't have to be cooked to the same level of doneness as a hamburger.
If you're roasting meat, you can get a thermometer that goes into the meat so you can find out whether the interior has gone up to a safe temperature. Chart of temperatures
Stewing meat (simmering it for an extended period until it falls apart) is another way to be sure it's safe.
Pork and chicken should be cooked all the way through. If you're not sure whether it's done, you can cut it open and have a look.
With beef and lamb, you only need to ensure that the outer surface is cooked - whether you want it cooked all the way through is just a matter of personal taste. However, if it's minced, you should cook it all the way (it has formerly-outer-surfaces in the middle).
You should probably specify how one would actually visually distinguish done from not done. Or maybe not, it sounds like PeerInfinity already understands the basics of cooking. I don't, however. :)
Uncooked meat is semitransparent with a kind of gelatin-like luster. As it cooks, it becomes more opaque and shifts color.
The exact color transitions depend on the kind of meat and whether it's had a chance to oxidize before you start cooking it. Chicken, which as mentioned you need to worry about the most, starts out a pale yellow-pink and cooks to a tannish color. Pork starts out light pink and cooks to a kind of light pinkish-gray; if it goes completely gray you've overcooked it. Beef and lamb start dark red, or dark pink if they've been exposed to the air, and cook to a deep red-brown.
All meat develops a brown crust over time if it's being grilled or pan-fried, but it's the interior color that matters. Another thing to look at is the kind of juice it's dripping; uncooked meat bleeds slightly, a thin reddish fluid, while well-cooked meat oozes gravy-like, clear or brownish liquids. It's safe before it stops bleeding, though.
One bit of food safety is to use a designated cutting board ONLY for chopping raw meat. One board for fruits and vegetables (and if they're wooden I find it's helpful to use a separate one for onions) and one for raw meat. You'll want to buy two that look dissimilar so you can't confuse the two.
When you're cooking, be sure to wash the knife between chopping up your raw meat and chopping up anything that might not be cooked to the same temperature. (Practically, this means to wash the knife or switch knives after the meat, no matter what.)
This thread just confirms the benefits of being a vegetarian.
Pish posh. I have admittedly horrendous sanitary procedures, and though I handle and cook raw meat at least 4 times a week I've never once gotten sick.
Pork actually should have a little bit of rose inside; I only cook my chicken until this is just gone (or even faintly visible). I routinely eat steak rare as can be, and tuna essentially raw.
It's certainly one benefit. Unfortunately, vegetables can also be contaminated, especially when animal waste is used as manure.
True. Many people die from green onions and spinach each year (not intended to bean exhaustive enumeration).