grisell wrote:There is another thing that makes this matter serious. If you make a salami with too much nitrite or a salami with botulism, only the ones that have eaten from it (hopefully only you in this case) will get sick.
Campylobacter and Salmonella, on the other hand, are contagious diseases that can affect many other people. They can be life-threatening to infants, older people and immunosuppressed people. Are you willing to risk other peoples' health and lives to satisfy your curiousity?
FOR SCIENCE! (more or less ...)
A lot goes on in our house that could potentially get someone sick. We feed our dogs and cats on a raw diet, and pretty frequently are found grinding 80 lbs of chicken necks, hacking into a deer vertebrae with an electric saw, grinding pounds of hearts and organ meat. On a nightly basis I need to feed them this food, so I'm constantly getting my hands in piles of raw meat. Ever had your hands in a bag of green tripe? That smell doesn't go away for days, and I can't imagine what nastiness is in that.
I think a lot of food sickness is caused by poor handling of the food. We clean like crazy people all the time because of what we do in our house. I laugh every time I see Alton Brown on Good Eats talk about "cross contamination" because that's just impossible for us to avoid.
I don't doubt that one
could get sick, but someone could get sick from anything that's been poorly handled. Isn't that why we use things like curing salts, and safe handling methods, to make the things we make out of raw meats? Isn't there always a risk of E. coli in beef? Or just because it's been studied ad nauseum we can ignore that risk?
I really think that chicken has a bad reputation from past experiences, and the fact that not much is really out there is only because no one is doing anything in fear of those past experiences. If the chicken comes from a reputable source and has been properly handled from bird to freezer, I don't see how it could be any less safe than commercially processed ground beef. Campylobacter and Salmonella, from what I understand, thrive in the feces of a lot of animals (not just chickens). I assume that the contamination comes from the quick processing/gutting of the bird and some of the intestinal contents coming into contact with the meat. If I'm buying from a farmer who might do this by hand, or if I do it myself by hand, as long as he didn't rub the meat in a pile of chicken feces I think it should be okay, but just to be safe ...
I just found this link here:
http://www.meathaccp.wisc.edu/validatio ... vation.pdf
There's a list of pH values that certain forms of bacteria can survive in. If I'm reading this correctly, would ensuring a pH of less than 3.8 make it more safe against salmonella? I think most fermented sausages are usually at a pH of around 5.8, so that seems like a huge difference.
http://www.wedlinydomowe.com/sausage-ty ... ed-sausage
This one here talks about a pH of 4.8 and a Aw (water activity level) of 0.93 to resist Salmonella.
I don't know a whole lot about pH in curing meats, other than what I've read on the forums here, mostly, so maybe someone else can chime in. I think we can agree that we all know the risks, so maybe we can try and think of some ways to reduce those risks using our combined knowledge and information we have available to us.
Otherwise we can read articles like this and just stop buying raw chicken altogether:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink ... finds.html
And if that's the case, I'll just put on my tinfoil hat and stay indoors since I hear those radio waves in the air might cause brain damage. Or something.
EDIT: Google "torisashi". Seems some Japanese chefs will serve this, but only from chickens that they raised themselves. Interesting.