Category Archives: Thermometers

PBS provides terrible advice for cooking hamburgers

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This is why I don’t give money to PBS, or as Stephen Colbert refers to them, State-sponsored Jazz. Reminds me of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation: they’re morons.

Maybe not about everything, but about stuff I know about, they’re morons.

PBS is broadcasting this video about how to cook moist, well-done hamburgers. The cross-contamination is awesome, way to go cooks. These people have no clue, even though they talk about bacteria, they still contaminate the rest of the kitchen with their bacterial-laden hands, and then go on to tell viewers that color is a good indicator for food safety.

Color is a lousy indicator for food safety. Use a tip-senstive thermometer.

You want a moist burger? Cook to about 150F, let sit for 5 minutes while the temperature rises to 160F
 

Final hockey game – Friday, 7 p.m., our place

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Fortunately, Dale’s in Germany so I don’t have to listen to how awesome Pittsburgh is and how he’s followed them since he was a kid.

Me, I was crushed when Pittsburgh beat out Carolina in 4 straight games in the semis.

But I’ve gotten over it to host game 7 of the National Hockey League finals Friday night. Seriously, in Manhattan, KS, and with Dale in Germany, Amy and I are  hockey central.

And Amy once again wants Detroit to win. Zetterberg is her hero.

Game starts at 7, we got the big screen, the HDTV, the food, the beer, and the hockey know-how – watch me explain again to Bob what offside is – and where would you rather be?

You’re all invited. Even you public health students I talked with this morning. I’ll show you how to properly cook a decent hamburger using a digital, tip-sensitive thermometer. Let’s see if you really read barfblog.com.


 

Murder Burger’s staff wear Meat is Murder T-shirts – and only serve meat

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Murder Burger, a New Zealand gourmet burger store that opened in the swish Auckland suburb of Ponsonby last year, used the following for an on-line Help wanted ad:

"We need a bunch of people to hang out with, make burgers and talk shit.”

The ad specifically requested student nurses and teachers to apply, explaining, "I’ve gone out with two nurses and two teachers and they were all awesome."

Not wanted were politics students ("Nothing personal, we just don’t understand you") or methamphetamine addicts.

"Again nothing personal. It’s just that the benefit of you being able to work seven shifts in a row is pretty much outweighed by the probability that you will one day flip, grab a knife and become Mr Stabby."

I’m all for it, as long as the burgers are verified 160F with a tip-sensitive thermometer.
 

Another ‘Bamaburger, no thermometers in sight

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U.S. President Obama went to another burger shop in Washington for lunch today, ordering up a cheeseburger with lettuce, tomato, jalapeno peppers, and mustard – not the fancy Dijon mustard.

He also ordered a cheeseburger for Brian Williams, anchor for NBC. The network was filming a day-in-the-life program at the White House.

The media accounts and video do not indicate how the burger was ordered – I always order well-done. Hopefully someone is sticking in a tip-sensitive thermometer to ensure the burger is cooked to 160F.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture says Americans should use a thermometer. Shouldn’t that apply to the President as well (photo below from AP)
 

Grill It! And make some kind of effort to kill the bacteria. With Bobby Flay

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After the successful tip-sensitive thermometer verified 145 F leg of lamb for dinner guests on Saturday, I’m back to basics for Memorial Day. Whole wheat rolls from scratch, spinach and tomato salad from the garden, and a roast chicken stuffed with an enormous load of garlic.

While entertaining baby Sorenne with initial solids – banana, sweet potato – I was preparing the chicken and trying to ignore the terrible advice from celebrity chef Bobby Flay, who said his BBQed chicken was done when it felt fleshy to the touch and the juices were running clear (sorta looks like the ShamWow douche, right)

This is absolutely wrong. Color is a terrible indicator. For instance, this image (below, left) from Pete Snyder is of a fully 165F cooked chicken leg with back attached.

Oh, and the cross-contamination involving raw product and dirty hands with Bobby and his guests was a microbiological disaster. But it’s OK. He’s a celebrity. Maybe they don’t barf like the rest of us.
 

Memorial Day: Stick It In to verify the burger is cooked

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I already caused a mini cow-poop storm when I suggested U.S. President Obama and VP Biden should be ordering their burgers based on a tip-sensitive thermometer verified 160F, and not the vague and meaningless, medium-whatever.

But food porn will always trump food safety.

So when the Obama Foodorama person wrote about turkey burgers today, there was no mention of temperature (in this case – 165F). There was 900 words of food porn – seriously, get an editor – and the cooking instructions consisted of:

“In a deep skillet, heat a small amount of neutral cooking oil on medium heat, almost to the smoking point. Put in four burger balls to cook at a time, and flatten down with a spatula. Cook for 3 minutes and flip, and cook an additional 3 minutes on the other side. In the last 30 seconds of cooking, pop Munster cheese slices on burgers, and cover pan so it melts.”

That has nothing to do with final end-point temperature, the temperature that kill the microorganisms that make people barf. Enjoy the Memorial Day holiday. And Stick It In for safety.

Food safety for people who don’t cook: stop blaming consumers

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The N.Y. Times asked me to comment on the food safety feature running this morning as part of their electronic Room for Debate section.

Douglas Powell, an associate professor of food safety at Kansas State University and the editor of barfblog.com, writes:

ConAgra Foods said on Nov. 14, 2007 when it reintroduced pot pies that, “… redesigned easy-to-follow cooking instructions are now in place to help eliminate any potential confusion regarding cooking times.”

I tried to them out at the time and found the instructions inadequate.

Were the new labels tested with consumers? Is there evidence from ConAgra that pot pie fans were actually following the instructions on the labels? If the company was serious about making sure the instructions worked, it should have tested the new labels with at least 100 teenagers in observational studies to prove that a target market could actually follow the instructions before introducing the product to the mass market.

The instructions direct consumers to use a food thermometer to test the temperature. But it appears that bimetallic thermometers (traditional kitchen thermometers) are used on both the ConAgra label and in the Times video; these thermometers yield inaccurate readings. For a more accurate reading, consumers would have to use digital, tip-sensitive thermometers.

Food safety isn’t simple – it’s hard. For decades, consumers have been blamed for foodborne illnesss – with unsubstantiated statements like, “the majority of foodborne illness happens in the home.” Yet increasingly the outbreaks in foods like peanut butter, pot pies, pet food, pizza, spinach and tomatoes have little to do with how consumers handle the food.

Everyone from farm-to-fork has a food safety responsibility, but putting the onus on consumers for processed foods or fresh produce is disingenuous — especially for those who profit from the sale of these products.
 

Preparing pot pies and blaming consumers

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The N.Y. Times repeated my year-and-a-half-old home-alone reporting and video shoot with ConAgra pot pies and other frozen thingies in a front-page feature this morning and reached the same conclusion: the cooking directions suck.

(BTW, the Times video accompanying Friday’s story also sucks, and they appear to use the wrong kind of thermometer — always be tip-sensitive)

The frozen pot pies that sickened an estimated 15,000 people with salmonella in 2007 left federal inspectors mystified. At first they suspected the turkey. Then they considered the peas, carrots and potatoes.

Threatened with a federal shutdown, the pie maker, ConAgra Foods, began spot-checking the vegetables for pathogens, but could not find the culprit. …

So ConAgra — which sold more than 100 million pot pies last year under its popular Banquet label — decided to make the consumer responsible for the kill step. The “food safety” instructions and four-step diagram on the 69-cent pies offer this guidance: “Internal temperature needs to reach 165° F as measured by a food thermometer in several spots.”

… attempts by The New York Times to follow the directions on several brands of frozen meals, including ConAgra’s Banquet pot pies, failed to achieve the required 165-degree temperature. Some spots in the pies heated to only 140 degrees even as parts of the crust were burnt.

And in a staggering example of corporate arrogance coupled with blame-the-consumer, Jim Seiple, a food safety official with the Blackstone unit that makes Swanson and Hungry-Man pot pies, said pot pie instructions have built-in margins of error, and the risk to consumers depended on

“how badly they followed our directions.”

That’s assuming people can read, that they can read English, that the instructions are microbiologically validated and that the instructions are clear – meaning there has been direct or video observation of consumers attempting to cook following the instructions.

Obama at E. coli risk? What does a medium-well hamburger mean?

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U.S. President Barack Obama and VP Joe Biden (right, photo from AP) ordered a couple of medium-well hamburgers for lunch today at Ray’s Hell Burger in Virginia, and while media and blog reports were the usual gaga over, OMG, the President ate, no one asked, what does medium-well mean? Was the President at risk of contracting foodborne illness like the other 83 million American mortals each year?

Color is a lousy indicator. And who knows what medium-well means from one mom-and-pop shop to the next. One of the blogs is already having a heated discussion about what medium-well means and not one person has mentioned temperature.

Anyone out there want to do a graduate degree? Go to 100 burger joints, order burgers, and when they ask how would you like it cooked, ask the server, what does that mean. See if anyone mentions temperature. Write up the various responses in a methodologically sound way. You may save a President.
 

90210: Pregnant and hungry for a hamburger

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Last night on 90210, Adriana, the drug-addict turned mother-to-be, was out dining with her boyfriend and ordered a hamburger, medium rare.

Pregnant Adriana could learn some things from Barfblog.

Medium rare does not mean the burger is safe to eat – rather a hamburger needs to be cooked to 160F, by someone who knows how to use a meat thermometer properly, to be safe. Cooking hamburgers to 160F is the only way to kill deadly microorganisms like E. coli O157:H7. Pregnant women, with their suppressed immune systems, should be particularly careful, and avoid certain foods.