Tag Archives: Turkey

Know your camel: Turkish men hospitalized after drinking camel’s milk, urine

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Two Turkish men were hospitalized on arrival to Turkey after drinking camel’s milk and urine while on an umrah visit, Hurriyet Daily News reported. 

The men believed the camel’s milk and urine to be good for health, claiming it was written in a hadith. An imam, according to the Turkish men, also drank the gonza.camelmilk and urine with them. 

The visitors were hospitalized due to high fever and unusual levels of liver enzymes. Further tests revealed that the two men had been infected with the “alkhurma” virus, reportedly catching the virus from the milk.  

The alkhurma virus is very dangerous and highly contagious and has a fatality rate of 25 to 35 percent, daily Hürriyet reported. 

İhsan Özkes, a retired religious cleric and current member of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), denied the existence of any hadith that would encourage people to drink camel’s milk and urine.

“Those who did drink it must have been ignorant,” he said.

Salmonella sickened Martha Stewart last month after ‘handling so many turkeys’

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Martha Stewart told the New York Post’s Page Six she was confined to her bed for several days last month because of a salmonella infection, adding, “I never get sick, but I came down with salmonella. I think I caught it because I was handling so many turkeys around Thanksgiving. I was on the ‘Today’ show, I did a number of other [Thanksgiving] appearances. It really hit me hard and I was in bed for days. It was terrible.”

A Top Chef Thanksgiving

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Last night with the 80 degree temperatures outside, I curled up in bed with the seasonal spirit to watch the Top Chef Thanksgiving. The chefs split into teams with Emeril Lagasse and Tom Colicchio to cook their family favorite recipes.

On team Emeril, returning cheftestant Josie used her immunity to cook her team’s turkeys for the FareStart organization which trains disadvantaged individuals to become chefs. At some point her birds started looking blackened and she deemed the ovens to be too hot. She dialed down the temperature and played a guessing game.

During the meal the judges discussed the very pink meat on the birds:

“Not recommended by the USDA.”

“Coulda cooked a little more, unfortunately, but well seasoned.”

“Good flavor from the outside, but the inside was practically raw.”

All the while, there were no thermometers anywhere. Given the feedback, I presume the judges ate the pink birds.

Back in the kitchen Josie commented, “I’ve had my ups and downs on Top Chef, but, I’m happy with the turkey over all. But the question is, ‘is it overcooked?’ ‘is it dry?’ ‘is it moist?’” Josie was shocked when the judges told her it was undercooked.

Had she used a tip-sensitive digital thermometer, she would have known the answer. Blackened skin does not mean the turkey is cooked to a safe internal temperature of 165F.

 

Fail: Cargill recommends washing turkey

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Cargill, the owners of the Honeysuckle White brand of turkey, may want to update its turkey prep instructions; and maybe before Christmas.

A barfblog.com reader sent in this label; I enlarged it but my aging eyes still couldn’t make out what it said.

According to the Honeysuckle White website,

“Leave the turkey in its original wrapping and place it on a tray in your refrigerator. Allow five hours of defrosting time per pound. For example, a 14-19 lb. turkey will need 3-4 days to thoroughly defrost. If your turkey hasn’t completely thawed by the time you’re ready to cook it, place it under cold, running water to accelerate the thawing process.”

This will spread Salmonella, Campylobacter and others throughout your kitchen, at home or in a restaurant.

Cargill also recommends, “Rinse the turkey both inside and out with cool water and pat it dry with paper towels.”

Guess Cargill’s not up on the science: don’t wash that bird (unless you killed it in your backyard with a bow and arrow in Kansas, sure, wash it to help get the feathers out; but I thought Cargill had sorta figured that out).

Talking turkey: Provide evidence-based information and let folks make their own risk decisions

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I still listen to a lot of punk rock and I don’t really like being told what to do. I’m not sure many folks do. The approach I use is to provide the best available evidence culled from the literature to help eaters calculate the risks and benefits of food choices. Present the info in a compelling way and then step back to let the individual do their thing.

Hopefully the choice results in the least amount of barf. Eating has risks, whether it’s raw oysters, sprouts, or Thanksgiving dinner. USA Today’s Elizabeth Weise deconstructs the risks associated with cooking turkey and all the fixin’s:

Step away from the sink, and no one will get hurt.

You don’t need to wash your turkey before you roast it, and doing so can be dangerous. A British study found that washing poultry in the sink can spray bacteria up to 3 feet away. And with one in 50 turkeys estimated to be contaminated with salmonella, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s food-safety inspectors, you don’t want a mist of turkey juice on your relish platter.

Given this contamination rate, the chef’s job is to keep the raw turkey juices away from anything that isn’t going to be cooked to 165 degrees, the temperature required to kill disease-causing bugs (the ones of interest in poultry -ben). Unfortunately, too many people start their feast preparations by plopping their turkey in the sink and giving it a good wash. There’s no need to do that. It’s a holdover from long ago when poultry routinely arrived with bits of blood and pinfeathers still attached. Cooks were instructed to wash the carcass well and use tweezers to remove any feathers that didn’t get plucked. With today’s modern processing, none of that is necessary. You just want to get the turkey into its pan and into the oven with as little dripping and splashing as possible.

If it’s a lack of refrigerator space that’s impeding your thawing, Doug Powell, a food-safety scientist at Kansas State University, notes that in any Northern climate, you can simply put the turkey outside in the garage in a closed cooler to keep out pets and vermin. His department wrote a paper on the topic and found that as long as the temperature is below 40 to 45 degrees it’s perfectly safe.

Then there’s the big question of whether it’s safe to lick the beaters when you’re making dessert. According to the Food and Drug Administration, approximately one in 20,000 eggs is contaminated with Salmonella enteritidis, the most common type of illness-causing salmonella. Benjamin Chapman, a(n assistant) professor of food safety at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, says he’s content to “let others make their own risk decisions.”
But for himself and his family, the answer is no (at least when I’m around and influence the decision – ben).

Check out these videos for risk-reduction steps:
Thawing the Turkey
Turkey Preparation and Preventing Cross-Contamination
How to tell when the turkey is safe to eat
Handling the Leftovers

How to have an uninvited Thanksgiving guest: Washing turkey, not using thermometer can be recipe for food poisoning

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From a Kansas State University press release:

When it comes to your Thanksgiving turkey, a Kansas State University food safety expert has two tips that could help keep your holiday meal safer:

* Don’t give your turkey a bath.

* Always take your turkey’s temperature.

Washing the turkey before popping it in the oven may be something you saw your mom — or grandmother — do, but Doug Powell, professor of food safety, said it’s a practice where mom really didn’t know best.

“Washing the bird has long been disregarded because of the food safety risk of cross-contamination,” he said. “Do not wash that bird — you’ll spread bacteria everywhere.”

Studies have found food poisoning bacteria like campylobacter or salmonella are common on poultry carcasses and can easily be spread by the splashes from washing the bird, Powell said. That means the sink, countertops, water taps and anything else in the vicinity — including other food — can become cross-contaminated. Washing hands after handling and preparing the bird also is a must.

Once the unwashed bird is in the oven, Powell said cooks should do themselves a favor and rely on a good thermometer to let them know when the main attraction is ready. Turkey should be cooked to an internal temperature of 165 degrees. Just checking to see if the juices from the bird run clear when the bird is pricked isn’t an accurate indicator of its doneness.

“Color is a lousy indicator of safety,” Powell said. “No matter how you cook your bird, the key is to use a tip-sensitive digital thermometer to verify safety.”

To help keep foodborne illness from spoiling the Thanksgiving holiday, check out food safety infosheets, prepared by Powell and Benjamin Chapman, a food safety specialist and assistant professor of family and consumer sciences at North Carolina State University, available at Powell’s blog:

* For tips on why not to bathe the bird, http://barfblog.com/infosheet/bathing-birds-is-a-food-safety-mess/.

* For tips on preventing holiday foodborne illness, http://barfblog.com/infosheet/avoid-foodborne-illness-during-the-holidays.

* For tips on holiday meal safety, http://barfblog.com/infosheet/holiday-meal-food-safety-2/.

A holiday food safety video also is available at http://barfblog.com/holiday-food-safety-dont-wear-the-turkey-on-your-head-and-other-tips/. And the Spanish and French translations of the infosheets can be found athttp://barfblog.com/infosheets-esp/ and http://barfblog.com/infosheets-fra/.

A Canadian Thanksgiving in Australia

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Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday because it’s largely non-denominational and celebrates the harvest.

I like that. So does Amy. She even feathered her hair 1978-Farrah-style for the occasion.

We also clean the house and have leftovers for a week. I make a great turkey stock.

Canadian Thanksgiving is this weekend, and I’ve hosted meals from Thurs to the Monday holiday over the years. We decided to bring our tradition to Australia, where the biggest challenge wasn’t explaining what Thanksgiving was, but sourcing and then biking home with a 21-pound turkey in my knapsack.

It also cost four times what a Canadian bird would have cost.

This particular bird came from New South Wales, and has some unique instructions on the label.

Washing the bird has long been disregarded because of the food safety risk of cross-contamination; do not wash that bird, you’ll spread bacteria everywhere.

And who puts foil in a microwave? I have no idea how a 600W microwave could cook a 21-pound turkey at home. But the key is, however you do it, use a tip-sensitive digital thermometer to verify safety.

Thanks to all our new Australian friends who made this our best Thanksgiving yet.

Mancini knows cross-contamination

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Actors may not know cross-contamination, but former TV heartthrob, about to be famous scientific author (more about that later), Kansas State MS grad and Winnipeg health inspector Rob Mancini proved he knows his stuff as he hammered home the importance of cross-contamination on CityTV the other day.

The video is at:

http://video.citytv.com/video/detail/1877249789001.000000/thanksgiving-food-preperation/

 

Over 80 tourists suffer food poisoning in Turkey

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Some 83 tourists were hospitalized Wednesday due to an outbreak of food poisoning in the seaside city of Bodrum, about 790 km south of Turkey’s Istanbul.

A provincial health director said that the tourists had been diagnosed with nausea and heavy stomach aches.

Officials from Food, Agriculture and Animal Breeding ministry took samples of the food and drinks that the tourists might have consumed.