Chicken...

Wow, chicken is just too complicated for me to cook!  Even a boneless, skinless chicken breast!  My only remedy is from packet to smoker, season than scrub my hands!  

Here are some great tips, if you can remember them all!

Wash the Chicken

This may come as a shock to all of you who automatically rinse your poultry just before cooking. It certainly was for me. So what’s the big deal? Cross contamination! Rinsing your chicken is an ideal way to spew nasty pathogens all over your sink and the surrounding area. Rinsing never did get rid of pathogens anyway. Instead, try to get the meat onto the baking pan with as little contact as possible. Then wipe down your counter with hot soapy water or a mixture of hot water and 1 tablespoon liquid bleach.

Use an Old Plastic Cutting Board

There’s an ongoing controversy about the safety of wood versus plastic boards for cutting raw chicken. As it turns out, old plastic cutting boards must be run through a dishwasher to be sanitized. Wood boards, on the other hand, are equally clean after a hand washing.  I also just read somewhere else that you can use some nail polish on one side of the board to detail raw meats on that side and vegetables for the other!

Forget to Wash Your Hands

You can’t be reminded often enough: Wash your hands well and scrub under your nails. Have you noticed that chefs and serious cooks don’t have long nails? And they tend not to wear jewelry, either. Both provide great hiding places for bacteria. That mysterious stomach bug you had could very well have been a case of food poisoning from your own kitchen.

Ignore the Magic Number

A lot of cooks still aren’t aware that the folks at the USDA dropped the recommended safe temperatures for all cooked poultry five years ago to 165°F. The good news is that this results in juicy, tender meat. (The old temperatures were 180°F for a whole roast bird tested in the thigh, or 170°F for a breast. Both often result in dry-as-cotton meat.)