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Wellness Wednesday for November 16, 2022

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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If chicken is pink does that always mean it's dangerously undercooked? That's what I was taught as a kid, wondering if that was a hypersafetyism

Yep. Though I've found if you wrap the chicken in bacon the pink will bleed through to the chicken even though both have been cooked thoroughly.

don't mess with chicken or pork when it comes to cooking

Zie Germans supposedly eat raw pork and they seem fine.

(On the other hand, the article claims that it's also popular in Poland but I don't recall ever running into that, so maybe the whole thing is a myth.)

Pork is literally twenty times safer than it was a few generations ago. That's probably still not safe enough for some people, and of course a good cook can avoid undercooking without going too far in the opposite direction, but amateur cooks who really hate overcooked or dried out pork should at least be aware that it's no longer quite as much of a necessity to err on that side of the line.

Well, some people eat chicken sashimi.

Poultry generally has a high risk of salmonella and to be sure it is safe most people cook it to a high internal temperature. But not everyone agrees. For a more moderate perspective, see acclaimed chef James Peterson who says a properly roast chicken will be pink in some places but it's probably fine if it's internal.

Well, some people eat chicken sashimi.

Torisashi, it's called. People expect it to taste bad, but it actually tastes better than cooked chicken, IMO.

It's probably dangerous in the sense that you're more likely to get food poisoning by eating it raw than by eating it cooked, but the chances are still low in absolute terms, at least based on my experience of eating raw chicken several dozen times and never getting sick.

For white meat, I'm pretty sure yes: "medium rare chicken tendies" shouldn't be a thing, but 165F is too high. There's a "more than you ever wanted to know" article about it from a guy who used to be a good food writer.

TL;DR holding at 145-150 for at least a few minutes is just as safe as an instant read of 165.

from a guy who used to be a good food writer.

Now he's a good food vlogger that makes my wife sick.

Wait, how?

She can't handle his forehead-mounted camera shots. I tried to show her some of his videos and she turned green and asked for a written recipe.

I am guessing it's because Kenji likes to strap a go pro to his head and record as he cooks. I can imagine that someone might get a touch of motion sickness from watching that.