Watching “Worst Cooks in America” last evening. The entree challenge for one team included turkey breast. One of the entries was noticeably pink and the chef said that they’d not taste it.
OK, that’s a choice for them to make, and not saying I disagree, but, on Iron Chef and other cooking shows I often see duck breast cooked and served what I’d judge as rare or medium rare at best. Certainly red looking in the middle.
One of the chefs on worst cooks is a sous chef for iron chef Bobby Flay.
So what makes it OK to serve rare duck breast but not OK to serve slightly pink turkey breast?
Are turkeys more likely to be contaminated with pathogens than ducks? I’m guessing both are commercially raised. Maybe the chefs working with duck do their own killing and butchering under cleaner conditions?
The thing is that salmonella ought to be only on the surface of poultry. Except… that popular birds like chickens and turkeys get injected with all kinds of fluids to make them juicier, and that injection can introduce salmonella into the center of the meat.
Duck, being less popular, probably doesn’t get that treatment, thus the pathogens will probably stay on the outside.
I don’t know for sure, that’s just my educated guess.
Ducks and turkeys are often de-feathered using a bath of hot paraffin (i think its paraffin), which will kill off surface salmonella, which then doesn’t migrate into the interior of the carcass. That’s the theory I heard anyway.
According to culinary wisdom, any red meat bird (duck, squab, geese, etc.) can be served medium rare. Turkey is not a red meat bird. Why can you get away with it in red meat birds? I don’t know, exactly. But Sattua’s guess is a good one. Ducks aren’t regularly injected with stuff to make them moist, so the salmonella (if there is any) has less of a chance to be pushed into the meat. Also, of course, there are just far fewer of them cooked and eaten in any one day, compared to chicken, and so less opportunities for fear mongering morning show news reports about salmonella outbreaks due to duck.
The USDA, of course, recommends cooking a whole duck to 165°F, right along with other poultry, which is way beyond medium rare (130°F or so.)
First, color isn’t the best gauge of doneness in poultry,
I’ve seen this ofter with turkey, cooked it to 165° add 10° for carry-over . . . and the meat near the bone was, while clearly cooked* the meat near the bone was pink. (*The texture change from raw to cooked is hard to mistake.)
Second, Duck (like a bunch of others, e.g. you don’t cook tuna the same way you do other fish) doesn’t follow the rules!
There’s nothing inherent in poultry (AFAIK) that makes it dangerous to serve raw. It’s the way it’s mass processed that exposes it to unnecessarily high levels of salmonella et al. I’ve seen people make chicken tartare, and I’d eat it, if I knew the history of that particular chicken!
Duck, particularly the breast, suffers horribly if you cook it like other poultry. Treat it like beef and it’s wonderful!
My WAG is that unlike pork (where the danger of under-cooking is so vanishingly small as to be non-existent and the benefits of cooking it properly are immeasurably large) the risk of getting sick from your average grocery store chicken is high enough that discouraging folks from taking any chance is something the network’s lawyers are going to insist on.
So if I shoot a pheasant, as I did last week, I could cook it medium without much danger. It’s never been injected with anything, other than some #6 shot.
If I raised my own chickens and was careful with processing I might be able to do the same, at least from a contamination view.
