On tong etiquette
My girlfriend got annoyed with me for using the same tongs to put chicken on the grill and take it off. Is this an actual issue or is she just being bossy?
It’s an actual food safety concern. I’m going to gloss over the bit about her being bossy. Why does the sight of a lighted grill turn all men into surly, territorial hippos?
Alas, I digress. Here’s why you should switch tongs midway through grilling.
When you put your raw chicken on the grill, you might contaminate your tongs with salmonella. This pesky bacteria reliably resides in raw bird and It’s the reason we all get a little touchy about raw poultry (or everyone except you, you cool, dimwitted cucumber). If it weren’t for salmonella, we might see more chicken tartare on restaurant menus.
When you use those same tongs to handle raw chicken and take cooked stuff off the grill, you could transfer some of the pathogen from the dirty tongs onto your ready-to-eat food. This would undermine the reason you cooked it in the first place**—which is what your girlfriend was trying to express.
The easy solution is this: change your tongs after you flip the chicken. You can wash the tongs with soap and then safely reuse them. This wouldn’t actually kill any bacteria but it would remove it from the surface of the utensil.
Or if you’re extra lazy like me, you can just hold the contaminated tongs over the grill for a few seconds and rotate them slowly. This will have the effect of heat-sanitizing them. Whatever salmonella had contaminated the tongs will be instantly killed at 165ºF — the same temperature you’re supposed to cook the chicken to — and no amount of DEAD salmonella can make you sick.
Anyway, you should be grateful to your girlfriend — she’s trying to protect your health and she’s 100% right on this one.
*There are safe methods for preparing and serving raw chicken but there’s such a strong aversion to the concept that we don’t see much of it at this point.
**The reason we cook food is because cooking kills bacteria, not because you prefer hot food and not because you think grill stripes are sexy.
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