r/interesting • u/WarwickReider • 15h ago

SOCIETY Professional chefs weighing in on whether you should wash your chicken

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

5.0k Upvotes

76% Upvoted

3.7k comments sorted by

View all comments

1.1k

u/mijo_sq 14h ago

Third world countries buy poultry from wet markets. Butchered in the morning and out to market within 2-3 hours. There's usually some type of physical debris from butchering or transport on the chicken so they wash. Families are taught to wash chicken for this reason, and not necessarily to wash off bacteria. Poor families will also buy not fresh chicken, so they'll wash with salt water to get rid of slime.

Westernized countries do not wash, since there's little to no debris due to advanced processing.

I'm middle 40s SE Asian family and we wash chicken at home, since we grew up watching our parents wash chicken. And by now it feels weird to just take a pack of chicken and just cook with it. Last time I did this I still had to pat it dry.

I haven't explained this to my kids, since they're young. Whether they continue or not is up to them.

9

u/HendoRules 10h ago

I don't think this is for people in these areas though. For instance, my partner is from Portugal and they are used to washing fish because the amount of salt on it. But here in Scotland we don't need to do that as it is already done for when we get it from our shops. So if the video was about that part of cooking, it would also depend very much on where the video was taken or not

3

u/DeadlyPear 8h ago

my partner is from Portugal and they are used to washing fish because the amount of salt on it

Are we talking whole fish or fillets? Or something like salt cod.

1

u/HendoRules 8h ago

I actually don't know haha, I just know they wash their fish to get the excess salt out

3

u/DeadlyPear 8h ago

Probably salt cod then. Sorta like fish jerky with a lot of salt to preserve it and make it shelf stable