recommend cooking all pork, beef, and lamb to at least 145°F—well into the medium to medium-well range Poultry has it even worse The USDA recommends that all poultry, whether ground or in whole parts, be cooked to at least 165°F It’s no wonder that most folks think chicken is a dry meat The USDA likes to play it safe, and their guidelines for safety are intended to be simple to understand and foolproof at the expense of being accurate The rules are designed such that anybody from the burger-flipper at Wendy’s to the most amateur home cook can understand and grasp them, ensuring food safety across the board I, on the other hand, prefer to put a little more faith in my readers’ intelligence The fact of the matter is that bacteria are not quite as simple as the “alive at 164°F, dead at 165°F” the guidelines would have you believe them to be Rather, a number of factors, including free moisture, fat content, the levels of dissolved solids like salt or sugar, and temperature, can all affect bacterial growth and decay in different ways The USDA knows this, of course, and if you delve deep enough into their guides, you’ll find some useful charts that begin to shed some light on the subject of meat safety Below is a graph I put together by drawing data from their chart on obtaining a log reduction‡ in salmonella in chicken MINIMUM SAFE COOKING TIME VERSUS TEMPERATURE FOR CHICKEN What you find is that there isn’t a simple temperature limit that defines when chicken is safe to ...MINIMUM SAFE COOKING TIME VERSUS TEMPERATURE FOR CHICKEN What you find is that there isn’t a simple temperature limit that defines when chicken is safe to