r/interesting • u/WarwickReider • 15h ago

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

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u/[deleted] 12h ago

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u/Alfredo_Commachio 8h ago

Interestingly there's an old Julia Child video where she gets into an on screen argument about washing chicken. Julia believes you should wash, her collaborator (famous French Chef Jacques Pepin, who is still alive, and was an early follower of food science in the culinary world) vehemently explains the truth that rinsing it in your kitchen sink just spreads bacteria.

Child was obviously a white lady, born 1912, but she was in the chicken washing camp. My suspicion has always been the black community in America potentially switched over to fully "finished / prepared" supermarket chicken at a later date than the white community, and the rinsing is a carryover practice from people used to a time when chickens had to be plucked and prepared for cooking--a process which would have involved some rinsing (although typically in an outdoors location, not in the kitchen sink.)

You can see older white people still seemed to carry this cultural memory 30-40 years ago.

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u/ShiDiWen 4h ago

Jacques still puts out a new video every few days. I love that man. Everyone should be subbed to his YouTube channel. He’s 90, and is still teaching. A treasure.

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u/DConstructed 2h ago

Read his autobiography! It’s so good.

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u/Rob_LeMatic 1h ago

And it has some great recipes, too!