My mom always stuffed her turkeys. I’ve always stuffed my turkeys. No one ever got sick. Of course, I grew up in a time when your mom would wrap your bologna-with-mayo sandwich in waxed paper, and it would sit in the cupboard at the elementary school until lunchtime. Maybe we were better equipped to fight off pathogens.
So how contaminated are turkeys? Assuming it has been properly stored, what are the odds of picking up a turkey that will contaminate the stuffing and make you sick?
From here. I didn’t link it though, because ‘common wisdom’ today seems to be that if you stuff your turkey you’re almost guaranteed to have a very brown time – or worse – in a couple of hours. Alton Brown has been advocating un-stuffed turkeys for years (decades?), and every year I hear warnings against stuffed turkeys online and on the news. It seems to be very widespread.
I know that meat can contain pathogens. I know that if the pathogens aren’t killed by cooking, they can be dangerous. I know that juices will carry them into the stuffing, which may not become hot enough to kill them. OTOH, ISTM that meat processing is probably much cleaner today than it was decades ago.
We’ve always stuffed turkeys and never had anyone get sick over all the years. Here’s an article with some advice on “safe stuffing” - might help: linky
As I understand it, the big problem is that the stuff in the cavity of the turkey won’t reach the proper temperature to kill harmful bacteria before the rest of the bird does.
It’s also my understanding that the brining solutions injected into frozen turkeys these days cause the meat to cook faster (and if you brine your turkey yourself, even faster still), thus making it even likelier that your bird will be fully cooked before the stuffing is comparable to turkeys of days past (and it seems to me that it was far more common in the past to overcook meat, as well).
So maybe the issue isn’t that we’re less equipped to deal with foodborne pathogens, or that there’s more pathogens in the first place, but that the food itself, and our methods of preparing it, have changed.
There’s no disputing that pathogens exist, and that people have become ill from eating undercooked meat, or stuffing that was cooked within a contaminated bird and did not reach the required temperature.
I seem to be having trouble framing my question. What I’m looking for is something like this:
If you are worried about this, you have already lived such a sterile life in thoroughly clean surroundings, that you have not developed any antibodies against anything, so you are at very high risk. The rest of us, who have eaten dirt all our lives, are immune to nearly everything.
I’m no food scientist, but when I was in the restaurant business we were taught to treat every piece of meat as potentially contaminated, because as far as you know, it is.
Go back and read the OP. ISTR indicating that I disregard the recent warnings.
Let me try to make my question more understandable. Some pigs carry Trichinella spiralis, which causes trichinosis. If T. spiralis isn’t killed by thorough cooking, it can infect the eater. But not all pigs carry the parasite. As meat processing practices have evolved, the risk has lessened to the point where some foodies advocate ‘medium rare’ pork. Chickens, like turkeys, can carry dangerous bacteria. Yet like pork, some people are saying it’s perfectly OK to eat under-done chicken.
To me, this says that meat-handling practices have reduce the percentage of contaminated carcasses. But this does not seem to be the case with turkey. So the question is: What percentage of commercially distributed turkeys are contaminated?
The answer still lies in the antibodies of the consumer. If a tribesman from the Amazon is given a piece of undercooked American turkey, he might be virtually certain of entertaining pathogens that he has no antibodies to protect him from. So, in that sense, 100% of turkeys are contaminated, but 100% of targeted consumers have defensive antibodies against them. On the other hand, he never gets sick from his drinking water, but I would.
In my kitchen I go weeks without even wiping off the cutting board. I never get sick, but if you ate at my house, you probably would. So is my cutting board contaminated, or not?
There are also spore forming bacteria to worry about, such as *Bacillus cereus *and *Clostridium perfringens. *Those are a lot tougher than salmonella. B. cereus is more likely to be in starchy foods like rice and cereal grains. C. perfringens from interstinal contamination from the bird. E. coli and Salmonella sp. get the huge concern, but the others, plus Campylobacter, can make you wish you could die.
I don’t have the time or energy to tackle this fully, but I will trot out my dusty old microbiology degree long enough to say this is a highly oversimplistic - and largely incorrect - view. For starters, you don’t really have a lot of long-term memory antibodies floating around your digestive system.
I am not sure if this will be viewable without a login but America’s Test Kitchen does a really interesting take on cooking turkey that solves the issue with stuffing and yumminess:
There is a turkey farm here, and there was also an all-turkey restaurant that cooked and served 100 turkeys a day from that farm. A buffet, like Thanksgiving dinner all year round, extremely popular. In the last 10 years there were several cases of salmonella connected with it, though the number of cases dropped a little due to vigorous cleaning, handling of food, experts brought in to try to keep on top of it. The restaurant tried everything possible, and people were still getting sick, so it finally closed, much to the distress of all the big eaters who loved the place.