We are regularly asked about cooking temperatures because ideally smoking food should be a S L O W process… When we ran the Old Smokehouse when it was still at Brougham Hall we recieved a complaint that one of our smoked chickens was raw… Our Environmental Health Officer talked us through our process and assured us it was not raw and would have been perfectly safe to eat. She toldus that when supermarkets first started doing hot roast chickens EHOs were inundated with complaints about “raw” chickens but actually this was because they were cooked for a long time at a low temperature and red juices remained – especially near the bones. As you may have noticed supermarket chickens are now very well cooked indeed…!
Anyway these are times and core temperatures required to cook meat to kill E coli 0157, Salmonella and Listeria:
60 C 45 minutes, or
65 C 10 minutes, or
70 C 2 minutes, or
75 C 30 seconds, or
80 C 6 seconds.
