The Shocking Truth About Food Safety: Extended Cut

Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street Radio - Milk Street Radio

In this extended episode of Milk Street Radio, host Christopher Kimball dives deep into food safety with experts Ben Chapman and Don Schaffner. The conversation covers the hidden dangers in common kitchen practices,

Key takeaways

Ground meats like beef, chicken, and turkey are more dangerous than whole cuts because grinding spreads surface bacteria throughout the product.
Cooking food to a safe temperature doesn't eliminate all risks—heat-stable toxins can form if cooked food is left in the danger zone (40–140°F) for over four hours.

Main topics

Food safety risks of ground meats
Heat-stable toxins and the danger zone

Notable quotes

"If you cook a stew and leave it at room temperature for 16 hours, pathogens can secrete toxins that boiling won't destroy."

"The absence of smell doesn't tell you there's no pathogen. That's the catch-22 in the smell test."

Conclusion

While food safety risks are real and often underestimated, experts emphasize that the benefits of eating

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:03) I'm Christopher Kimball, and this is a special episode of Milk Street Radio. Today, more reasons to fear your kitchen. We're airing an extended version of my interview with food safety experts Ben Chapman and Don Schaffner. Don and Ben, welcome to Milk Street. Hey, Chris. Speaker 5 (0:20) Pleasure to be here. Speaker 3 (0:20) Yeah. Speaker 5 (0:21) Thanks, Chris. Speaker 3 (0:21) So you guys are going to get a first-class workout because I have all these questions about food safety, and you guys are the experts. So I'm going to – I've got like 20 questions, so let's start. So chicken, turkey, and ground beef seem to be uniquely – dangerous in the kitchen as opposed to a steak or a roast. Is that true? How much more dangerous are they and why? Speaker 5 (0:52) Well, let's start with the ground beef question, right? So any food that's ground, you know, the inside becomes the outside and vice versa. And so with ground beef, we're concerned with making sure that the coldest spot of that burger reaches the temperature that you need to kill bacteria. Chicken and turkey, if they're whole muscle, the bacteria are still on the surface. If you turn them into ground turkey or ground chicken, now the risk becomes essentially equivalent to ground beef. Speaker 4 (1:21) Yeah. And I'll just add that something like steak or roast isn't, you know, risk free. One of the things that we've seen over the past 15 or 20 years has been the rise of. needle or blade tenderized meat. And so as Don said, you might have something that looks kind of like it's fully intact, but has had pathogens that are on the outside pushed inside. And ultimately, when it comes to meat and poultry, it's making sure that you're handling things and not spreading pathogens around when it's in the raw form, and then utilizing thermometers to understand what the endpoint temperature was of the food once it's cooked. Speaker 3 (2:04) So, OK, so the next thing is years ago, I realized that and I think you actually talk about this just because you got the chicken, for example, to 160 degrees doesn't mean you've killed off all the potential pathogens. I mean, there still could be, quote unquote, poison in the chicken, even if you get it up to a safe temperature. Speaker 4 (2:27) Yeah, I mean, you know, Chris, what you're talking about is what Don and I. talk about as heat stable toxins. And typically those toxins are formed when a cooked food is held at. ambient temperature for longer than four hours. And that could be while it's cooling. Like we have some really great examples of someone making a stew and putting gallons of hot liquid in a refrigerator. And it might take the middle of that pot, you know, 16 hours to drop below, you know, 140 degrees, right? And during that timeframe, pathogens can secrete these toxins that even if you boil that stew afterwards, you're not really going to do anything. to take care of that toxin. So Speaker 3 (3:12) if you roast chicken to 160, 65 and eat it right away, you're unlikely to have those toxins in the bird. It's just if there's a long period of time where it's in the danger zone later, the pathogens would be secreted. Speaker 4 (3:27) Yeah. Yeah, you're exactly right. And some of the more like famous cases have been about like leftover rice. But yeah, same thing with, you know, a wide variety of other foods where these pathogens may exist on the outside and they really aren't a problem until you cook them and trigger them and then leave them at room temperature for a long time. Speaker 3 (3:50) You're listening to my extended interview with food safety experts Ben Chapman and Don Shafter. Coming up, the safest way to cool down your food. Speaker 2 (4:03) Hey, guys, I'm Jenna Bush Hager from The Today Show, and I'm thrilled to bring you my podcast, Open Book with Jenna. Every week, I sit down with fascinating people, authors, celebrities, and friends to talk about life and the books that shaped them. If you love great conversations and discovering your next favorite read, join me on Open Book with Jenna. Listen now, wherever you get your podcast. Speaker 3 (4:34) This is Mill Street Radio. Now let's get back to my interview with food safety experts Ben Chapman and Don Schaffner. So you take a Dutch oven full of stew or soup, and instead of throwing it right in the fridge, I put it on a cooling rack on a counter for two hours. Is that okay to do, or are you telling me actually a big amount, like a six-quart Dutch oven that's got three quarts of soup or stew, is never a good idea because it's never going to cool down fast enough? Speaker 5 (5:05) Yeah. So when the food is really hot, it doesn't really matter whether it's in the fridge or whether it's on the countertop. What you have to do then, though, is get that food into a shallow container. So as long as the depth of the food is two inches or less, it's pretty much foolproof. Speaker 3 (5:22) If it's too Speaker 5 (5:23) hot to handle, leave it out on the countertop. But then after an hour or two on the countertop, I would divide it up into shallow containers that are two inches or less. Or Speaker 3 (5:30) get it out of the pot you cooked it in right away because that pot's going to retain a lot of heat. Speaker 4 (5:34) that Dutch oven is really holding the heat. Exactly. And the other thing I'd add is the importance of not having a lid on it where you're going to have more evaporative cooling. That's, I