I thought the purpose of cooking meat was to kill bacteria and harmful things like E coli and salmonella, but don’t these things all die at the same temperature?
In: Chemistry
Cooking is not just about safety, it’s also matter of taste and texture changes – killing everything harmful can be achieved at mere 75 C, or even lower but at longer time. Only bacterial spores survive that, but they don’t matter for food eaten immediately, they won’t have time to wake up and multiply.
But at 75 degrees meat hasn’t even reached boiling point of water and various other chemical reactions occur at even higher temperatures – to sear/brown the meat or caramelize sugars you need 140.
Also it’s not that you have to Cook something like chicken to 165, you can cook it to 150 or so and if it stays there for a few minutes you are good… 165 is usually recommended because the kill time is seconds instead of a minute or 2.
Not sure what meat has which bacterias in it and how they die…
But the different ways of cooking different meats is more about how tender the meat will be after the cooking process. If you cook a steak on a low-medium heat for a long time it will be rubbery and not very nice. Hot and short will have a nice outside and a soft, tender and sometimes almost raw inside.
Other meats have to be cooked for a long time at a slow temperature. Its about how the proteins in the meat react to the heat.
It’s not just the bacteria. Before animal feed was medicated (UK) meat like pork had to be cooked to a higher temperature to kill the worms typically found in pigs and some other game meats (still a problem).
Different meats have different bacteria and harmful things in them, some have more and some have less. So you don’t need to cook some meats as hot as others because those meats don’t contain the particular pathogen that needs the higher heat.
Different animals carry different parasites and/or are associated with different bacterial contamination.
Those different organisms may have different heat requirements to kill them and make the meat safe to eat.
You could just pick a higher tempreture that kills the hardest to kill organism, but using different tempretures helps take into account the style in which people are accustomed to eating the meat.
For example, chicken (165 degrees F for safety) needs to be cooked at a higher temp than beef(145 degrees). Of course they could just make it 165 for both and that’d be easier, but cooking a steak to 165 makes it tougher/drier where we like it juicier; chicken doesn’t suffer so much from being cooked a little more and it needs that extra heat to kill off the possible pathogens it may harbor.
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