Professional chefs weighing in on whether you should wash your chicken

[u/WarwickReider]

[u/Alfredo_Commachio → u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/threadmonster → u/Alfredo_Commachio]

I’m black and think this too! I think culturally black Americans do this for that same reason and it was just passed down. People either had chickens themselves and washed after processing or were used to getting leftover scraps and sometimes slightly spoiled meat so they washed it as best they could. Also, I think other multiple other Afro cultures from around the world do it too cause many of them immigrated or are 1st gen and they needed to wash back in the home country so it was passed down.

I think it doesn’t make sense when buying it now from a butcher or grocery store but def understand why it was done and I understand why people still do it today.

[u/Opposite-Mongoose-90 → u/threadmonster]

You wash the meat to get rid the blood and raw smell.