weekend Cook

I am going to smoke a brisket, pork butt, and whole chicken this weekend. Is it going to be ok to put the chicken on the top rack with the pork and the brisket on the bottom rack or do I need to find another place to cook the chicken. I have never done a whole chicken before. Any sugestions?

Thanks,
Ryan

Do the pork butt on the top, the brisket on the bottom, and save the chicken for a later, separate, high heat cook, if possible. In any case, most would advise never doing poultry physically above anything else.

Just to emphesize what Doug said. When I had the health inspector out looking the place over so I could open my restaraunt. I was told I was not allowed to cook chicken or fish along with any other meat.

There is nothing in the FDA code that I am aware of that disallows mixing of meats in a cooker as long as internal finish temps are realized. Of course, if your county disallows it you have no choice but to comply. But the position is not science-based. Any cooker, be it oven, combi, WSM, whatever, cooking at accepted cooking temps, will kill pathogenic bacteria. As much as I do not like the thought of chicken juices dripping on meat below, those juices are pasteurized virtually instantly when they emerge into the hot temps of the cooking device.

I have been party to just this sort of discussion with food microbiologists and safety experts, many of whom contract with FSIS, and can quote them directly if anyone is interested.

Thanks Kevin. The chicken paranoia is one of my pet peeves!

Not trying to say there is NO danger with chicken, but come on folks, let's get real. Follow a few basic guidelines for food handling, and you'll be fine.

Now, about that "Chicken Fried Brisket" recipe.......

Big Grin,

JimT

Kevin it must be a local code then. That is something they told me when they were there. Actually they first said not to mix meats and I was about to jump into a rant. I said I can't cook pork and beef together? They then said the fish and chicken then I pointed neither of them are on the menu. They then said pork and beef was alright. I wasn't going to argue about it since neither was on the menu.

The main guy was pretty cool. He even mentioned about cooked food you have to wear gloves even though he didn't agree with that. I have seen you mention that in other threads of conversation over the past years. But he added that it is the law.

In many places it is a law that gloves must be worn with ALL ready-to-eat (RTE) foods, meaning cooked foods but also salad ingredients, cheeses, bread, etc. The problem, as I've mentioned before, is that so long as gloves are on you're legal. What this does (and it's easy to see at most fast food joints where the employees where gloves) is offer a false sense of security to the customer and the employee. If you touch raw chicken, e.g, then a RTE item you've just cross-contaminated--gloves are not going to prevent that. Cough into a glove hand and then pick up bread to make a sandwich--same thing. Wipe your nose, scratch your head--you get the idea.

Single-use disposible gloves, like one sees at Subway, are better because--so long as the staff is instructed to do so--they are put on to make one sandwich then tossed. My problem is with fitted latex or vinyl gloves that are often donned at the beginning of a shift and infrequently changed. Frequent thorough hand-washing is, imo, better. It is very easy to get used to the feel of the gloves and simply go about your shift doing some or all the things (and more) mentioned above.

Jim-- Yes, you're right. Problems with chicken happen when it is undercooked (decidedly not proper food handling) but far more occurrences of salmonella and campylobacter poisoning occur because of cross-contamination: using a cutting board for RTE food on which raw chicken was previously placed without adequate cleaning of the board, handling raw chicken then RTE food without proper handwashing, and the like.

Just a little salmonella tidbit I got today in an e: "Quarterly Progress Report on Salmonella Testing of Elected Raw Meat and Poultry Products: Preliminary Results, April-June 2006"

Table 1 says the contamination rate is: whole chickens 11.8%; hogs 1.1%; Cows/bulls 0.0%; Steers/Heifers 0.0%; ground beef 0.6%; ground chicken 80.0%, ground turkey 20.9%; whole turkey 11.4%.

Speaking strictly in terms of aesthetics, then, I don't want what drips out of the cavity of a chicken on my beef or pork.

I know. There's something about that image that's disquieting.

One of the food safety consultants mentioned that most people have no issue with chunks of chicken stir-fried with shrimp or pork and vegs, chicken placed on a roasting pan on top of vegs and/or aromatics and roasted, even chickens lined up in one of those multi-skewered auto-rotisseries where the chicken on one skewer drips on the chickens below as the skewers rotate. In all cases it's the same juices being released but the food is perfectly safe to eat if the food is cooked to the proper temps.

He thinks, and I agree, that it's the nature of the juices one finds on one's cutting board when cutting up chicken (or even simply removing pieces from a package). Beef, pork--those juices seem like colored water. But chicken juices? Hardly.

Tonight, bone in Rib Eyes Sunday or Monday Brisket. But right now I am doing my "all day" red sauce and it will take all day. We plan to can most of it when it is finished.

I agree with Kevin.

In commercial cooking, you want to store or cook food in order of their potential food safety issues, so you put poultry on the bottom, then pork above, then beef, and so on.

But let's get real here. They don't want raw chicken juice dripping into something like beef, which may or may not get cooked all the way through.

But in a smoker, the chicken will be done first and the pork will take many hours until the internal temp is up to 195 or so. The external temp, where the drippings are, will be over 200. All the germs are dead, dead, dead.

While a health department may require a procedure that is not strictly necessary, I have no doubt the food will be safe to eat.