I have a pack of chicken sausage that says it’s fully cooked.
But in its cooking instructions, it says to grill it making sure the internal temperature hits 165 degrees. But if it’s already fully cooked, why would I have to do that?
Even in fully-cooked food, there’s a slight chance that it could contain bacteria or other baddies that will be killed if you cook to 165 degrees. It’s probably very slight, especially if the sausage has been properly stored and you’re eating it before the expiration date, but still, the company wants a bit of CYA.
Eat a couple. Tell us about it in the morning.
If you live.
I did eat a couple, though I did heat them up, but probably not to 165.
If I had a food thermometer, I wouldn’t be buying fully-cooked sausages.
I’ve eaten them cold many times, no problems.
They put those warnings on a lot of frozen food, too.
Lawyers.
Well, I’m still alive and not ill if anyone cares.
One of my favorite hangover food: cold chicken wings.
Food safety’s a difficult thing. When it comes right down to it, just about everything you put in your mouth has the potential to make you sick. We like to think that meat is the real bad thing, but it’s not - you can easily get sick from contaminated vegetables or fruits.
The best thing you can do is to cook everything, but even that’s not 100%. Not all baddies are killed by heat. Botulism, for example, will still be plenty able to hurt you no matter how hot it gets. And who the heck wants to cook their lettuce or other fresh veggies/fruit?
On the other hand, we’re all here, and we all eat everyday. So though the chances of getting sick are there (we’ve all experienced it) it’s typically not frequent enough or bad enough that most of us want to take every precaution there is.
So just use common sense. That fully-cooked sausage, if it’s been stored correctly, is no more likely to hurt you than the raw carrot in your salad. Can they hurt you? Sure. Everything can. But when it comes right down to it, there’s not much you can do to be 100% sure you’ll never get food poisoning.
Botulism spores are killed by heat at 250F for three minutes (or five or ten, depending on your source.) Ain’t gonna help you with your steak, but for canning, that’s what you go by. And that’s for killing the spores. The toxin itself can be eliminated by heat at a much lower temperature (something like 175 for 10 minutes.)
Kinda. And yeah, saying “plenty able to hurt you no matter how hot it gets” is wrong, I mis-spoke. I tend to think it terms of cooking, where sure, you can burn something to a crisp, but who wants to eat fully-charred steak?
And not all spores are killed that easily. According to “Modernist Cuisine”:
So sure, you can kill it. But you can’t kill it and make your steak edible.
The B. cereus toxin is more classically associated with leftover rice rather than steaks, in part because reheating it won’t destroy it.
The problem with botulism isn’t the spores, it is the toxin. Botulism is anaerobic, so you really only should be worried about things like canned food, food immersed in oil (esp garlic) or sous vide applications. Of course, all of these things are done commonly and with some knowlege of the dangers are pretty readily avoided.