Divisive kitchen task that could be causing you serious harm: 'Very, very dangerous'

Even if you’re the biggest meat eater out there, you’re probably a bit funny about handling the raw stuff, particularly chicken. We know it’s covered in nasty bacteria, and, for many of us, holding it at arm's length and dropping it into a pan is as close as we want to get to it in its uncooked form.

But if you spend time online, there are plenty of people far more, shall we say..."at one" with their raw meat. They’re keen to wash it, scrub it, and rinse it up to five times before they even start any preparation.

Then depending, on your chef, there are directions to soak the chicken, rinse it until the water runs clear and add limes, vinegar or baking soda to clean the raw meat. One video even boasts a ten-step chicken washing guide, leaving the comments pretty divided.

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"A house I’d feel comfortable eating at," one person wrote.

"My family has always washed chicken!!! I swear I can taste when someone doesn’t wash the chicken 😭 I hate the taste!," another added.

"I love this…. Whoever doesn’t wash their chicken, something is definitely wrong with them,” said another.

However, others were not convinced, leaving comments such as "Omg this is way too much work" and "The only way chicken/meat is clean is through heat."

Should you wash your chicken before cooking?

There are plenty of viewers who are confused though and for anyone who has never cleaned their chicken and lived to tell the tale it seems a time-consuming process. But more importantly, experts are keen to explain it’s also unnecessary and even harmful.

“Washing uncooked chicken introduces harmful bacteria to your kitchen especially if you use the same sink as you use to wash your fruit and vegetables,” a food safety consultant from WA, Erina Male, told Yahoo Lifestyle.

And watching the videos it’s not hard to see why.

Water from the “cleaned” chicken sprays all over the sink and backsplash taking with it germs from the uncooked meat.

“If you’re worried about bacteria or salmonella and you think that by rinsing it with water you’re going to clean it, what you’re actually doing is spreading those germs around your sink...and making it very, very dangerous in your kitchen,” celebrity cook Bobby Parrish told his 1.5m followers in a video to debunk the theory behind washing chicken.

“I’m not sure where this practice comes from. Maybe when there wasn’t great temperature control for storage and you’d get slimy chicken people thought to wash it to remove that,” Male said. “But it’s never been something we’ve done in Australia, maybe overseas.”

"A lot of people here don’t understand that in South Asian and Middle Eastern culture (and I’m sure others too) it is VERY common to wash chicken," one person explains on a chicken washing video. "Esp when bought directly from the butcher!"

It is also not uncommon to wash chicken before cooking in Moroccan and Caribbean cultures too.

Why chicken washing isn’t necessary in Australia

However, in Australia, chicken is thoroughly cleaned before it’s packaged which means that you don't need to wash it unless you really want to.

“To process chicken it’s washed in a food-grade chlorine tank to reduce the level of bacteria. It’s called sanitising,” Male said.

Temperature is also closely controlled throughout the packaging and delivery process and that absorbent pad sitting underneath your chicken is designed to help too.

Known in the biz as a “meat diaper” (gross) the pad absorbs bacteria-filled liquid that leaks out of the chicken so it doesn’t sit in a pool of it, causing more bacteria to breed.

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It also means it doesn’t drip off your chicken and onto your counter when you unpackage it.

All these processes mean there is less bacteria on raw chicken than there could be and Male said the only thing you then need to do to make the chicken safe to eat, is cook it.

“Chicken needs to be well above 75 degrees and that kills all harmful bacteria,” she said. “Any good quality fresh chicken shouldn’t be washed. It doesn’t need to be.”

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