How to Avoid Salmonella When Cooking Chicken

Recently, the risks of Salmonella, in particular from eating chicken, have been mentioned so often on TV that you would expect incidences of infection to have reduced significantly. Sadly this is not the case. For people who eat chicken regularly, the dangers of getting ill or worse are far higher than they should be, and instances still occur.

Knowing exactly what Salmonella is will help cooks reduce the risks and avoid illness or worse.

Salmonella Explained
It is a form of food poisoning which is the result of a bacterium that lives in humans, poultry and other animals used for meat.
For those who get salmonella, they can expect fever, diarrhoea, being physically sick (ie vomiting) and severe stomach cramp. Symptoms may start within a few hours after eating the infected poultry and may last along as 3 days. Most people make a full recovery naturally, but in some cases, it can be a lot worse, resulting in hospital care and in a few cases, even death.

Avoiding Salmonella

The advice given to those who are cooking with chicken is :

* Wash your hands AND the chicken before before you start.
Salmonella can exist on your hands and also on the hands of anyone else how has touched the chicken. Cleaning thoroughly reduces the risks.

* Keep raw chicken away from anything on the kitchen counter.
If getting ready to prepare a chicken meal, cross contamination is a major risk. To reduce the danger, do not use the same cutting utensils for raw chicken as is used for cutting vegetables. Also, use one cutting board for the chicken and another fo the vegetables.

If you follow these precautions, cooking with chicken is perfectly safe and has benefits fro your general health,

Assuming you are now feeling a little more upbeat about purchasing and cooking chicken, here are a few other things to consider to make your chicken meals more healthy and tasty.

These days there are many benefits to purchasing 'free-range' chickens or even totally organic chickens. Even the high street grocery stores are starting to sell 'organic' or 'free-range' chicken, so gettiing hold of it is easier than ever. This is a good thing because many of us are unhappy that the larger chicken producers are more or less just looking for a profit and not looking out for the health and wellbeing of their chickens, or the end consumers. The name, 'free-range' is usually more familiar to people seeking to have a healthier eating lifestyle - it needs the chickens to have access to the open air and be allowed to wander around and eat naturally instead of being confined in a small pen, or crammed into a barn with thousands of others. Free range chickens live a more pleasant and stress free life, and this results in a taster meat, and a cleaner conscience for the consumer.

Organic chickens, which can also be 'free range', have the further restriction that they are not subjected to antibiotics, hormones, herbicides or pesticides. Many people think that both Free-range and organice chickens taste better and are juicier.

Did you know that organic chicken breasts have only 10 fat calories, 110 thigh calories and a whole chicken only has 130 calories?
If you are dieting, that has to be worth knowing, right?

If you are trying to build muscle and are concerned about protein, free-range chicken breasts have 22 grams, thighs have 19 grams and the whole chicken has 21 grams - all of that from a meat that is also delicious!