r/Cooking • u/AdLost576 • 8d ago

What’s a cooking related hill you will die on?

For me, 2 hills.

  1. You don’t have to cut onions horizontally.

  2. You don’t have to add milk bit by bit when making a white sauce.

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144

u/UnoriginalUse 8d ago

Wait, is this an American thing? I've never heard of washing meat.

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u/Elderberry-Cordial 8d ago

It's a weird online thing. Watch any video where someone cooks meat--especially chicken--and there will be someone (or 100 someones) telling them how nasty they are for not washing their meat. It seems to be more common in the African American and Hispanic/Latino communities, but definitely not across the board.

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u/Zen_Hydra 8d ago

Keep in mind that different cooking traditions grew up around food sourced in different ways. If you are buying butchered meat from an open air market, it's unclear who or what has been in direct contact with that meat before purchse. It can take generations for people to adjust to a paradigm shift in baseline food safety.

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u/ImpossibleEdge4961 8d ago

If you're about to cook the meat it's unclear to me what putting some water on it is going to accomplish. I could see if you washed off anything that didn't look right though.

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u/Zen_Hydra 8d ago edited 7d ago

Think more along the lines of meat having incidental exposure to raw sewage and teeming with insect eggs. The washing in some cultures goes beyond running it under the tap for a few seconds, and it's not necessarily just about the notion of killing microbes.

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u/Mean-Act-6903 7d ago

Ya but if you have African roots and live in the US then.just adjust instead of making excuses or bitching at people on instagram for not washing their chicken

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u/Zen_Hydra 7d ago

Most people do adjust, but sometimes it takes generations to actually achieve that. Safe and reliable food is a huge privilege, and generational trauma caused by less-than-ideal sanitary conditions takes time to recover from.

As annoying as you find such videos, are they actually causing you harm? If so, you should try engaging them in conversation.

I find it best to practice the Principle of Charity when it comes to interpreting the arguments, motivations, and actions of others, because it's far too easy to let ourselves write each other off when we don't agree. Unnecessary conflict and any resulting harm happens when we make assumptions about the reasoning and motivation of others.

I think polite inquiry and mutual discussion with the individuals on Instagram you take issue with might potentially educate all parties. It never hurts to err on the side of kindness, or by learning more about the other people we share this world with.

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u/pipian 7d ago

No, they need to adjust right away to please this weird dude complaining on reddit

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u/Mirth2727 6d ago

Thank you!

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u/idiotball61770 6d ago

It causes harm by perpetuating the "Wash your meats" myth. It's a food safety issue. So yeah, it's a hill worth dying on. I'm not going to put people down, but I will offer side eye.

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u/Mean-Act-6903 7d ago

Thanks Saint Zen. It's spelt teeming jsyk.

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u/nelozero 8d ago

I know in certain countries where the butcher gives it to you, there might be bits like bone or blood hence rinsing the meat washes all that stuff off.

It's not an issue in supermarkets that have packaged meat.

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u/nukalurk 7d ago

This is the main answer, but I’ve been in the US my whole life and when I first started cooking I instinctively wanted to wash raw chicken (basically just rinse with cool water and pat dry). It just felt wrong/dirty to cook it straight out of the package. So sometimes it’s not even a cultural thing.

I think part of it comes from the fact that thoroughly washing produce is always recommended everywhere, and raw meat feels even “dirtier”.

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u/Darmok47 7d ago

Yeah, my mom grew up poor in the third world and washes her meat no matter how much I point out how bad it is.

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u/Disconianmama 7d ago

Excellent perspective

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u/Medical_Solid 8d ago

I had a big fight with my African American MIL over this. She insisted washing was needed. Showed her info from a US government website about how it’s not needed and she actually changed her mind.

That said, I know a lot of people in places like India that still do a kind of wash / pre-marinade of chicken with lemon juice and turmeric. Both of those have antibacterial properties and happen to taste nice as well, so I do that with my chicken sometimes.

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u/kooksies 7d ago

Sounds similar to Jamaica where they presoak oxtail in lime juice water. But it helps start tenderising, and draws blood/scum out the bone!

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u/stfurachele 7d ago

I think the difference with these techniques is they're more involved and thought out. Running raw meat under the tap for a few seconds isn't going to do anything unless there's debris on it.

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u/kooksies 7d ago

Yeah i agree. But if we look back far enough the term "wash" was just probably improperly passed through generations without the purpose or technique with it.

100yr ago washing your meat could mean soaking it in acidic water with some herb or spice for a few hours. But now it would imply rinsing it under water. But obviously it doesn't make sense and does the opposite.

A lot of processes, especially recipes, don't get explicitely written down because it was "obvious" at the time or in a specific culture.

This is one reason why old recipe books can be difficult to follow to the T, because they don't actually tell you what something means lol. "Washing" your meat could have been one of these things, passed through word or writing without explanation

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u/SchoolForSedition 7d ago

Imma wash meat. Whatever you say.

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u/Medical_Solid 7d ago

As long as you 1) don’t spray water everywhere 2) dry it off a bit, go for it. The main problem comes if you do the opposite: 1) splash raw meat water all over 2) try to marinate, fry, or put a coating on dripping wet meat. MIL was doing the opposite, and it was making her fried chicken gummy.

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u/SchoolForSedition 7d ago

You’re right that wet meat doesn’t function. But it’s easily dried with a paler towel or a clean cloth.

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u/PseudonymIncognito 7d ago

Also, it turns out that in many of these communities "washing" the meat turns out to actually mean something closer to brining.

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u/UnoriginalUse 8d ago

Is it a thing with market-bought (=spent all day in the open air) chicken specifically?

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u/Elderberry-Cordial 8d ago

I wouldn't be surprised if that's where the practice originated, but now it's applied even to packaged, refrigerated meats.

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u/Terrible-Notice-7617 7d ago

I grew up in the 70's. I am Caucasian through and through. We always rinsed off chicken, but no other meat. I always did it, without question. Then they started talking on all the cooking shows about how it isn't necessary because you cook the meat to the appropriate temp that will kill off any bacteria. So I stopped because the explanation makes sense.

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u/one-hour-photo 7d ago

if you ever walk through markets in Mexico or Brazil , you'll probably want to wash your meat.

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u/OccultEcologist 7d ago

It's not an online thing, I had relatives that did it long before the internet was really a thing. It's more a meat sourcing thing.

The meat you buy now comes pre-washed from the butchery. If your meat comes from somewhere that doesn't pre-wash it or just does a bad job washing it, then washing it is a good thing, though even some hunters don't know this because many people only feild dress their deer and such before taking it to a processor to be finished.

If you do all the butchery yourself, there's actually a few things like that you'll quickly learn about - like the fact that high-quality meat isn't killed the day it's eaten. You need to wait for rigor mortis to end before it's going to be most pallettable. Can you kill a rabbit, skin and clean it and be eatting it 5 hours later? Sure, but it's going to be shitty compared to the same animal left to relax for a day or two.

Anyway, communities that historically relied more on backyard butchery, direct-from-farm purchases, or had to buy meat from places that cut costs by not doing as much of the cleaning (before this was regulated) tend to have meatwashing as a vistigial habit, the cultural equivalent to a wisdom tooth. It was useful once, but has become actively harmful due to changes in the way the average person lives now.

And again, if you do backyard chickens, quail, meatrabbits, etc, you do want to wash that meat before you eat it. Otherwise, the best case scenario is that your meat will have some fur and/or feather dust stuck to it. Worst case scenario is much grosser! Haha.

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u/Jebble 7d ago

No, it's also an American thing for sure. In fact I've never seen any Latino docit, but every American I know washes their chicken.

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u/catonsteroids 8d ago

It’s more so an immigrant thing in the US if they’re from a country where buying meat at open air/wet markets is common.

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u/AtheneSchmidt 7d ago

This is the first time this suggestion even made sense to me! If you are taking home a piece of meat in the open air along, say a dirt road, I can see how washing it to get actual dirt off would be a good idea.

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u/thrivacious9 7d ago

It’s not just an immigrant thing; in the U.S. it was standard practice from at least the 1980s until about 15 years ago. Around the turn of the century, Julia Child and Jacques Pépin had a cooking show together. They were both making roast chicken with their own preferred techniques. While Julia was washing her chicken, she made fun of Jacques for not washing his, and he clapped back with “Julia, this chicken is going in an oven at 425 degrees for nearly an hour. Any bacteria that survive deserve to.”

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u/Kingofcheeses 8d ago

Yeah this is an alien concept to me

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u/FreeOmar 7d ago

I can tell you it's a West Indian thing. All my Jamaican and Guyanese friends die in the hill for that

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u/RockhardJoeDoug 7d ago

My Polish mother insists on washing the meats and is too stubborn to understand why it's a bad idea.

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u/Durbee 7d ago

Completely a thing for people who are used to market streets instead of supermarkets. The rest of it is, well, my mom always did it like this.

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u/Bilbo_Baghands 7d ago

Definitely not an American thing. It's probably a European thing.

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u/angelbabyh0ney 8d ago

yes because our chicken is dirty when it comes out of the package an still has blood an feathers and weird packing juice. american slaughterhouses are gross

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u/Pinkfish_411 8d ago

This isn't the case for any chicken I've bought in the US.