Cooking Chicken over other foods...

I've seen and heard lots of stories about never cooking chicken over other foods, because the chicken drippings can be dangerous.

Most of the folks who talk about this say it's ok to cook chicken over chicken.

My question is this: Why is it ok to drip the dangerous chicken drippings on chicken, but not on pork butt? If chicken drippings are bad, aren't they ALWAYS bad?

Inquiring minds want to know...

No. Because chicken drippings aren't categorically 'bad'. As long as both foods in question are cooked to safe temps, no harm. Though the idea of chicken drippings can be unnerving (the idea can get me too), there is no justification for banning chicken-over-whatever as long as safe temps are achieved.

Strange. I've never heard of chicken drippings being dangerous, per se. One of my favorite family recipes is baked chicken thighs with baked potatoes. After the thighs are plated, we usually "empty out" the potatoes onto our plates, then pour the drippings/baked flour crust from the chicken thighs over the pseudo-mashed taters. Butter can't even touch this stuff.

Thanks for your reply, Kevin...

Actually it was a bit of a rhetorical question.

I think BBQ Forums are strewn with so many more "facts" than any other Internet discourse.

Most folks think it all about the "germs" that are generally killed off during cooking and totally disregard the toxins that some of these "germs" can produce, which aren't affected by heat at all.

Ah well...

True.

Rhetorical or not, it comes up from time to time--and is frequently answered incorrectly. Yes, 'facts' abound. It's the dilettante approach to cooking.

I have to admit that I am one who has traditionally has held to keeping the chicken drippin's off other meats. But, now that I think about it - I don't see where it would be "dangerous" unless the temperatures of the meats were too low like Kevin said. Hmmm, it's interesting how we hold to things we hear without really thinking about them.

Anyway, that being said, lets say we did let our chicken drip on ribs or butt - would that impact the flavor of the meat significantly for better or worse?

Yes, on your first point, it's interesting how we'll hang onto something like this. But Dan's dish is a good example--as are the hundreds of stuffed chicken recipes or the recipes for roasted chicken that include various vegs in the pan to be cooked with the chicken. Those vegs, like the myriad stuffing possibilities, absorb what else? Drippings. But the results of both are perfectly safe as long as safe internals were achieved. In the case of stuffed poultry, this means safe temps within the meat and the stuffing. (Tip-sensitive digital thermocouple or thermistor probes should be used to test, not analog bimetal probes.)

As to your question--better or worse--I think that depends on the prep of the items in question, the taste of the cook and the approach of the cook. I almost never combine meat cooks because I do not use the same rubs or marinades for different meats. Further, I use the way things smell during cooking--and so prefer the aromas to remain distinct--to let me know how things are progressing.

I got the idea of cooking chicken over veggies from a Paula Dean show. They were in Paris and a street vendor had a rotisserie full of chickens rotating over potatoes. I do it fairly often. -RP
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