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Julia Child poses with "the chicken sisters" before an episode of The French Chef in which she teaches united states of america how to roast a bird. Courtesy of Paul Child/PBS hide explanation

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Courtesy of Paul Kid/PBS

Julia Child poses with "the chicken sisters" before an episode of The French Chef in which she teaches us how to roast a bird.

Courtesy of Paul Child/PBS

It seems about sacrilegious to question the wisdom of Julia Child.

Offset with her opus Mastering the Art of French Cooking and subsequently with her PBS cooking bear witness, the unflappably cheerful Child helped rescue domicile cookery from the clutches of convenience nutrient. She taught us how to love — and take pride in — making something from scratch.

And all the same, in at least one important kitchen skill, Child got it expressionless wrong: rinsing raw poultry.

"I just think it'southward a safer thing to practise," Kid tells viewers in one clip from The French Chef in which she shows u.s.a. the ins and outs of roasting craven.

Ms. Child got many, many things right. Washing her birds before cooking was apparently not i of them.

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"Oh, no!" says Drexel University food safety researcher Jennifer Quinlan when I inform her that Child was in the pro-bird-washing campsite. "I don't want to have on that."

Yet take on the doyenne of Tv set chefs she must. For Quinlan is on a mission to get America's home cooks to drib this widespread habit of washing poultry earlier cooking.

"In that location's no reason, from a scientific indicate of view, to think you're making information technology any safer," she says, "and in fact, you're making information technology less prophylactic."

That's because washing increases the chances that you'll spread the foodborne pathogens that are almost certainly on your bird all over the rest of your kitchen too, food safety experts say. Nosotros're talking nasty stuff like salmonella and Campylobacter, which together are estimated to cause nearly 1.9 million cases of foodborne illness in the U.S. each year.

Some studies suggest bacteria can fly upwardly to 3 feet away from where your meat is rinsed — though you tin't necessarily see it. If that thought alone doesn't give you pause, perhaps this slimy "germ vision" animation will exercise the fox:

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But fright not: All you have to do to kill these unwanted bacteria is to cook your meat properly (a thermometer tin can assist — craven needs to reach an internal temperature of at least 165 degrees Fahrenheit) and continue your utensils and cooking surfaces clean.

Quinlan and her collaborators at New Mexico State Academy's Department of Media Productions have created a new public wellness campaign to get the word out nigh why washing poultry is a bad idea. Her focus-group surveys, conducted as part of a research project funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, suggest as many every bit ninety percent of people rinse their raw birds — even though the USDA has brash against it for years. The practice is slightly more common amid minorities, she says, just pretty much everyone does it.

And Quinlan expects some people volition go along to cling to their bird-rinsing ways. Some people, she notes, simply exercise it because they call up their chicken is slimy. "If your chicken is so slimy that it needs washing, something is wrong," she says. "Other people say, 'That's just how I was taught to do information technology.' "

It doesn't help, she says, that many celebrity TV chefs (not simply Child) and cookbooks call for this as a offset stride. But science, says Quinlan, is actually giving the lazy a gratis pass — nay, an imperative — to cutting out this step.

And some people for whom raw-chicken-meat baths have been a source of marital strife may welcome Quinlan's message wholeheartedly.

Equally my colleague Dan Charles told me (sorry, Dan, I'm outing you here): "I never did [wash my chickens], but then my wife* forced me to. So as shortly equally this matter is posted, I'm sending it direct to her."

* Footnote: Dan insisted I note his married woman is lovely.