Can I call you a cab?
I would not want undercooked pork anyhow, not being a rare-meat afficionado.
But quite aside from that… yeesh, people, you only have to be wrong once. We’re not talking about a little e coli or salmonella here. Trichinosis damage to your heart muscle is forever.
You might want to go back and read the thread. Per the wiki link provided by Ferret Herder trichina is killed at 144F, I have read several places that it is killed at between 137-140F.
Several on line sources list 145 for 15 seconds as the minimum safe temp for pork.
Finally, the CDC only listed 12 cases of trichinosis over a five year period. (Thanks Tapioca!) In a country of 300 million people that is about as close to zero as you can get, and still have it register.
With the advent of instant read digital thermometers the days of needing to cook pork until it is dry, tasteless, and the consistency of shoe leather is over.
Bottom Line:
It has nothing to do with color and everything to do with temperature. If your pork reaches 150 degress then with the holdover heat everything should be fine.
(edit: This is in reply to Shamozzle’s post)
That’s called mett. I’ve never had proper mett, but I’ve tasted raw pork when seasoning sausages right after a pig slaughter.
Been brining all my poultry and pork (sugar in the pork brine really enhance the flavor too) since the Good Eats episode originally aired! Actually, since the family insists on a Butterball I’ve never made a not tweaked bird.
Just started dry brining beef too (I’d link to the recent thread, if I could search for it :mad: ).
You do cook your whole birds breast side down, right?
CMC +fnord!
Really? At all?
Hmmmm.
(The D-Lux One reads some posts, scratches his head, ponders a while, and then starts typing.)
Having read all this, I think I’ll have to get a better meat thermometer than the six-buck GoodCook brand one we got from Safeway, and at least try a pork butt roasted that way (i.e. still a tidj pink but with a readout of 155 or 160 degrees on the thermo), a time or two anyway. Some serious ignorance-fighting has gone down around here in the last 24 hours; a gigantic, D-Luxn8’ed “thank you” to cuisine-informative Dopers everywhere!
PS: I ain’t cookin’ no chicken that way though, never!
To clarify, IIRC, I like my pork loins done to 155F and no more.
In case you didn’t see it, check out this thread.
CMC +fnord!
We’ve established that there’s no health risk to eating pork that has some pink in it. Given this, it is not a fact that such pork is undercooked - it is simply your opinion. I know people who consider pink beef to be inedible. That is also their opinion.
Pork in the U.S. is much leaner than it used to be. It used to be possible to cook a pork roast (for example) to 180 degrees F (about 82 degrees C) without it getting dry. If you try it now the meat gets very dry and tough. This is why people are eating pork rarer than they used to. Even so, most people who would enjoy a steak cooked to, say, 125 degrees F (about 52 degrees C) wouldn’t want their pork that rare, simply as a matter of taste.