Are you cooking breaded chicken products safely?

Adequate cooking is not enough. Cross contamination of cooked food and food that is eaten raw (e.g. salads) is also a cause of food poisoning. This is mentioned in various articles on the FSA website.

That is a separate issue from cooking chicken properly. I agree (of course) that it is important to keep raw and cooked foods apart. I suppose once upon a time mums would pass this sort of information on to their children, and domestic science was taught in school. But I wonder how many mums these days know much about handling food and cooking? Or dads for that matter.
Luckily much food does come with preparation instructions and these should be followed.

Unless the instructions stress the need to check that food is adequately heated (or cooked) they are not adequate.

In my experience the instructions include, besides temperature and time, “cook until juices run clear” or similar. If some are not competent, or not capable of following instructions then they should not be let loose to cook. Apparently most people in the UK consume chicken twice a week on average (seems a lot, but it is the most popular meat). That seems to result in very few problems.

As with most animal food our quest for quantity and price has inevitably led to less than ideal conditions. Although even if I were a chicken living in a nice field with lots of grain and grubs, knowing one day I would end up in an oven would be disturbing. I can still avoid the worst by buying meat from outdoor birds – and getting better flavour to boot.

Quite how we provide the affordable food people want without compromise in production processes is a conundrum.

Here is good advice from the Food Standards Authority. The first sentence would be relevant to breaded chicken and similar products:

“Meat
Before you serve pork, poultry and minced meat, make sure it is steaming hot and cooked all the way through. When you cut into the thickest part of the meat, check that none of the meat is pink and that any juices run clear. In a whole bird this is the area between the leg and the breast.”

When I last looked at frozen chicken products the instruction to make sure that they are steaming hot and cooked all the way through was often missing from instructions.

This is part of the instructions for cooking Tesco chicken:
”Cooking Precautions

Remove all packaging.
Check food is cooked thoroughly and juices run clear when pierced with a thin skewer before serving.
To avoid cross contamination, do not wash raw poultry and use separate chopping board and utensils for raw poultry and ready to eat foods.
Wash hands after touching raw poultry.
Check food is piping hot throughout before serving.
All appliances vary, these are guidelines only”

That seems fine and hopefully similar instructions will be used by other manufacturers/retailers. It would be interesting to know what instructions are provided for frozen breaded chicken and related products.

For comparison, the cooking instructions for Tesco Frozen Breaded Chicken are:
“Oven from frozen
Instructions: 200°C/Fan 180°C/Gas 6 30-32 mins Place on a baking tray in the centre of a pre-heated oven.”

There is no mention of making sure that the food is piping hot before serving.

I have rarely bought chicken and certainly not in the past seven years. The animals tend to be treated poorly and remain unconvinced that the poultry industry is doing enough to improve standards.

Yesterday afternoon I visited a local pub with a huge beer garden, where I was invited to pick up one of the small chickens. It’s nice that they are genuinely ‘free range’.

A pie or a Kiev is relatively large and oven or microwave heating may not be enough to ensure that the contents become hot enough to kill bacteria. That’s why its important to check the temperature and if necessary extend the cooking time. Instruction may recommend checking that food is piping hot before eating it.

It is certainly worth washing salad ingredients, and even bagged salad leaves can occasionally cause food poisoning. This was a serious example: https://www.thegrocer.co.uk/food-safety/salad-leaves-linked-to-major-uk-ecoli-outbreak-/538597.article It is permitted to wash salad leaves in a disinfectant solution to reduce the risk.

I like the taste of some lettuce, Romaine in particular, but does it actually have any nutritional value? Celery can be used as an alternative both as an ingredient in a salad and as a garnish or decoration.

https://www.google.com/search?q=lettuce+nutritional+value&rlz=1C9BKJA_enGB896GB896&oq=lettuce+nutricion&aqs=chrome.2.69i57j0i10i433j0i10l4.7299j0j7&hl=en-GB&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8

I treat lettuce as an accessory, and quite like mixed salad leaves, but I cannot see the attraction of iceberg – tasteless. Decent salads for me contain olives, hard and soft cheese, nuts, apricot, peach, hard boiled egg, spring onion, radish, celery, cucumber, croutons, as well as a modicum of leaves. Oh, and anchovies add flavour. Not necessarily all these components together.

Lettuce and celery do not provide much fibre but every little helps if you don’t have much in your diet.

I like tomatoes, beetroot, pickled onions, sweet pickle, mango chutney, celery, cucumber, grated hard cheese, apple and half a hard-boiled egg in a salad [usually all together], sometimes with pâté, sultanas, grapes, coleslaw or peppers, and mange tout and little new potatoes as accompaniments. I’ve gone off spring onions and radish and I dislike olives.