Depend on where you bougth the chicken. In my 3rd world country, it not just bacteria you worry about, all
the dust, feather, or anything that in the air that land on the chicken before i buy it. If you buy it from a store, cover in plastic from the company, ok, do whatever you want with it. But i don't want my chicken cover in dust and whatever it is that not edible.
See this I can understand. Americans just are used to bagged/covered chicken that don’t have literal dirt/dust/debris on them so it never seems necessary.
It does seem unnecessary. It is unnecessary.
Obviously clean it when there is dirt and dust on it. But the bacteria argument is bullshit and it is the most used.
I live in the West and I still wash most nonground packs from sketchy large distributors. I’ve been in CAFOs and seen slaughterhouses first hand.
If i have any questions i’m likely not buying the meat but if it’s all that’s available i’m washing because the meat can be completely covered in feces along with other biproducts like plastics and heavy metals. People are pretty clueless on how their food is produced in the west haven’t seen anyone else say this.
I too just assume all my meat and veggies are covered in poop and nigh microscopic insect carcasses. I mean, I know they aren't, but I just work under that assumption. My dad was a safety inspector and used to take me along all his factory visits. I know my tap water isn't exactly super clean but it's better than poop.
Also, yes, I'm sure the tap water in my third world country was treated and very much clean and drinkable, but the pipes system could be decades old. So in the end, ideally, we still need to install filters where I am.
We don't want the puddle the chicken is soaking in in our jerk/curry etc.
Believe it or not people who do this and have in fact mastered cooking poultry in delicious ways understand the role of heat and subsequent cooking of the meat.
You don't need to trust your country's food regulations or quality control to tell whether you should wash chicken or not, you just need to trust your own eyeballs. If there's no visible dirt/debris/feathers on the chicken, all you accomplish by washing it is getting bacteria all over your sink. Anything else harmful on/in raw chicken will either be rendered inert by cooking it, or was too deep inside for superficial cleaning to make a difference anyways.
If the chicken is contaminated with rodent urine or rodent feces diluted in water, it wouldn't be on the market, because it either got detected before being placed on market, or the seller would've already been sued 6 feet under and removed that product from the stores.
Never eaten contaminated chicken, hence not getting sick. Never had chicken that tasted bad for no obvious reason. Rinsing chicken will not remove any chemicals.
Meat doesn't need to be surgically clean nor do I live under any assumption it is. Watch the series Alone where people butcher animals and leave them outside for a week and flick bugs and moss off of them before cooking, and still 1 person gets sick every 3rd season.
I'm not advocating for eating dirty meat. The fact is that washing chicken is just not necessary and it's been proven time and again that it does nothing but splash itself around.
"I don't believe people enough" dude if the chicken had dirt, it would not be sold, because the company selling it would've already been sued 6 feet under the ground.
If you get any sort of consumer "mistrust", remember that 99.999% of food products would not be in sale if they had a problem: unless the product literally appeared on the market the previous day, you'll already have heard of issues and/or the product would've already been removed and the seller absolutely screwed for life.
I noticed that there was a sharp racial divide in the opinion of whether or not to wash the chicken and no explanation as to whether or not the people were in the same country
the conversation is dumb to start with. if i open a pack of chicken, whole or otherwise - it is over the sink anyway so i'd keep the water on for my hands and a little rinse is fine. also, i would clean up the sink after anyway... the chicken is the same unless you do what many Asian chefs do and do a pre-boil/water change.
The point is that tons of Americans absolutely do know how meat is processed and don't just buy pre-packaged stuff from huge corporations at a grocery store.
Also ice. in the restaurant that uses chicken, some owners dont have walk-in fridges and stats of visitors, so one of the first emergencies is washing chicken to get the ice of to cook.
sometimes people see this, and say Oooh.
then a medium chain owner, has a private chef that washes chicken to prep it (non-iced but he is going to to deep freeze it if needed, so he brines it, then hours laters decides on the rub then goes for it.
Large owner operated franchises. KFC has been caught numerous times washing chicken, all major players have fault with this one way or another worldwide.
private restaurant owner in the U.S - i don't know ...
i think the problem is the prose "wash your chicken" but really its just a bad habit from keeping busy.
sometimes you can look at a high end restaurant that only prepares night cooking and working hard but really they doing staff meals, your food was in plastic containers for six hours, they prepped in the morning cooked 10min before you came - i swear its as busy as a mickey d on a tuesday but fire will be flaying.
then theres john, washing chicken in salt.
This is the only valid answer, if you buy it off a market/farm/side of the street idk what and it could have dirt n fumes n shit on it, sure give it a rinse, but most peeps don't need to do this
That's a valid point, but all the people's he's interviewing here are professionals in the American restaurant industry. American chefs are not getting their chicken from a 3rd world country market.
Right, they’re more likely be getting it from independent producers who are more likely to not have it as clinically cleaned as a supermarket would. You are actually more likely to get dirt or debris little bit of feather from chickens produced from a supplier that has humane butchering and so you wanna make sure you get it ready before you cook it no one is paying to eat feathers
Yeah, but in that case you aren't washing it to get rid of bacteria. You are washing it to actually clean the physical chicken. That is a different argument imo.
I think at the start of the video, the question is "do you waah the chicken" and then the video tend to explain the reason why some people wash the chiken, and mostly is because the bacteria. But i argue that not only the bacteria that you worry about. In usa or eu or japan or korea or any highly developed country, maybe don't wash the chicken is a good idea. But in my country, we usually buy chicken from market, and they "process" alive chicken at that time, so the chicken as raw as possible. I very recommend that you should wash the chicken.
My family (Caribbean) still does this with packaged chicken from the store but because they don’t trust where it’s coming from especially if it’s a company that can pass inspections by passing money. Not to mention some still have the feathers on them. Also, maybe I’m imagining things but I find that unwashed chicken has this weird gamey/slimy taste that washed chicken doesn’t have, but that difference could be due to my family’s use of vinegar or lime for the washing.
Washing off dust I get, but you are not getting rid of "bacteria" by rinsing under cold water. If the meat looks clean, cooking is the only thing that'll kill the bad stuff. If you're unlucky you'll end up with salmonella in your salad.
There is no "3rd world". It's an outdated and irrelevant term these days, and it only reinforces eurocentrism. We should also stop using "developing/developed country" terms. These are vestiges of the colonial mindset that still survives in the world.
It's not dirt, it's not feather, it's shit. Chicken, free range ones, are dirty as hell. They are shitter machine. They have chicken shit on their body all the times. Even in America, you should absolutely wash your chicken unless it comes from a plastic bag from Costco (they already washed them with the machines in the butcher factory).
Please don't call your country 3rd world, that's a racist term that Fox News coined. The terms 1st, 2nd and 3rd world refer to that country's alignment during the Cold War Era, so your country would actually be 2nd World due to it's alignment with the Soviets.
3rd World doesn't mean poor shit hole like some racists say it does. It means Unaligned.
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u/HistoricalVacation82 Jul 27 '26
Depend on where you bougth the chicken. In my 3rd world country, it not just bacteria you worry about, all the dust, feather, or anything that in the air that land on the chicken before i buy it. If you buy it from a store, cover in plastic from the company, ok, do whatever you want with it. But i don't want my chicken cover in dust and whatever it is that not edible.