Why can we eat duck meat medium rare, treating it like red meat, but chicken, which is white meat, has to be fully cooked, even though both are types of birds?
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Because it’s much less likely that duck meat is carrying bacteria/parasites.
Cooking food is all about risk management. You could eat raw chicken 100 times and never get sick if you’re lucky. Or you could eat slightly undercooked pork once and get super ill.
Ducks and chickens are farmed very differently, and chickens are just way more likely to be carrying something that can make you sick, so it is recommended that chicken gets more thoroughly cooked.
Bacteria and parasites can still exist in duck meat or beef, but it’s just much less common, meaning having medium rare duck or beef isn’t as risky.
You should cook both to the same temperature to be safe (165F). Most people still get grossed out at chicken at that temp though as it feels “under cooked” to those of us raised on it being cooked till it was dry
It’s a bit of an oroborus.
There’s nothing inherently wrong about eating any kind of meat rare. Chicken Sashimi is a thing in some Japanese restaurants.
But chicken prepared for sashimi is treated very differently from your standard grocery store bird, because the producer knows there’s not going to be that extra kill step to prevent people from getting sick.
That grocery store bird can be safely sold with a lot of bacteria on the surface because it’s going to be thoroughly cooked, but one destined for sashimi (or just a medium rare duck) has to have more careful processing.
Duck meat has a different type of muscle than chicken meat so we cook it differently. Also duck is not a common carrier of salmonella like chickens are. There are disagreements however, the USDA for example recommends all poultry including duck and chicken to be cooked to 165F.
Both duck and chicken can have eg salmonella. Temperature of 165F / 74C kills the potentially dangerous bacteria, including salmonella.
If you briefly bring the inner temperature there, there is going to be some juiciness left. Perhaps the reason you don’t see chicken done like that is more due to tradition or e.g. only having duck in restaurants?
Also, meat can be cooked to a lower temperature, but then it needs to be e.g. tested and controlled, or you need to trust that the potential bacteria would be on the surface of the cut, where it’ll die to searing. Poultry tends to have much higher amounts of salmonella and e coli than e.g. cattle.
Ducks are regarded as red meat in culinary tradition because the breast meat is darker in color. This is thanks to higher levels of myoglobin in their breast muscles. Both should be cooked to the same internal temperature in the thickest part to eliminate most food borne pathogens. That’s 165 ºF / 74 ºC. The appearance and texture will be different due to the difference in myoglobin and fat content. The higher fat content in duck meat makes it juicier and more moist compared to chicken. The higher myoglobin content will make it look more like what we associate with medium rare from steaks.
The chance of chickens carrying food borne pathogens like Salmonella is higher than that of ducks because of how chickens are farmed compared to ducks. Much more extensively and in more crowded conditions. That means the meat has a higher chance of being contaminated when the bird is slaughtered.
It has more to do with how they are raised than the species itself, the problem with chicken is that the farms are overcrowded and not very clean so there’s a high chance of bacteria being in the chickens
You actually can eat chicken medium rare, you just need to be careful how you cook it.
The high temperatures people tell you to bring meats like chicken or pork to are the temperatures which will quickly kill the bad germs, but lower temperatures will also kill those bad germs, it just takes longer.
The sous vide style of cooking can be used to get rare or medium rare chicken or pork safely, and they’re both delicious cooked that way.
Duck meat is generally safe to eat at lower temperatures because duck farms have implemented strict biosecurity measures that reduce the prevalence of pathogens compared to chicken farms. However, it’s important to note that proper cooking practices should still be followed to ensure safety, like cooking duck to at least 165°F (74°C) to kill any potential bacteria.
Because chicken is cheap and duck is expensive.
To keep chicken cheap it’s farmed in truly disgusting ways. The workers who have to enter the coup houses are generally in full bio hazard suits and respirators. They need that much PPE because everything and I mean everything is covered in chicken shit. Any kind of poop around a food source is generally pretty terrible food safety wise.
If raised in more sanitary conditions (like ducks often are, or most chicken found in Japan) there is nothing intrinsically less safe about chicken than duck.
But because we know that the commercial farming of chickens creates a much much higher level of risk, it’s standard practice to cook chicken to a temperature that mitigates that risk.
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