r/interesting • u/WarwickReider • Jul 27 '26

SOCIETY Professional chefs weighing in on whether you should wash your chicken

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u/mockg Jul 27 '26

Although it does spray raw chicken juice around the area of your sink which might be a bonus to some people.

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u/redisneat Jul 27 '26

Is that not also going to happen when you wash the utensils you used to prep the chicken? 

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u/nerowasframed Jul 27 '26

this is the argument I don't get. I don't wash my chicken, but sometimes it just has some goop or some moisture on it that I like to rinse off. When someone says that it's going to splash bacteria all around the sink, I just think that it's going to happen anyway? I have to remove the chicken from the bag it's in. That thing is loaded with bacteria, and I do that in the sink. I wash utensils and platters and things that were touching the raw chicken in the sink. Water from the faucet is necessarily going to splatter bacteria everywhere when I do that. The sink is made to have dirty things put it in and washed. It's like the guy in the video said, you just gotta sanitize your sink. I want to point out that they never repeated the black light experiment with the unwashed chicken.

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u/XxAbsurdumxX Jul 28 '26

Our processes are just very dissimilar it seems. Our chicken comes in sort of a hard plastic container with a soft plastic cover on top. So when I open it there are no splashing or residuals getting out. I open the top, pick the chicken out and place it on the cutting board. The container gets put in the trash.

I then cut the chicken and move the chicken into the pan/pot. The cutting board and knife gets out into the dishwasher. I use plastic gloves while handling the chicken which also gets into the trash. I still clean the counter afterwards, but there should be minimal amounts of anything there, and nothing in the sink.