Why does raw chicken have a limited shelf life in the fridge, but if you cook it, it can sit for days and be fine?
In: Chemistry
cooking any meat removes nearly all bacteria from it and pauses decomposition which would cause the raw meat to go rotten.
we cant kill all the bacteria and permanently halt decomposition, so eventually cooked meat spoils too
Raw chicken has bacteria living throughout the meat. This bacteria will grow and eat the meat as food, which produces toxins, which is what makes the meat rotten. When you cook the meat, you kill that bacteria. Some of that cooked meat could get a few microbes of bacteria, but it would only be on the outside of the meat, and will be far less than whatever was in the chicken to begin with. Storing the chicken in the fridge will also help to inhibit the bacterial growth. This is great for the cooked chicken with just a few bacterial cells in it, but with the raw chicken with the bacteria already present, it’s still enough that growth is possible.
Both have a limited shelf life. Raw chicken can remain in the fridge for 1-2 days and cooked chicken can remain in the fridge for 3-4 days.
Cooking food kills any bacteria that may be in or on it. Cooking also reduces moisture and typically adds things like salt which also make it less hospitable to pathogens. But it bacteria and such can still grow on it, just at a slower rate, hence the longer shelf life.
It comes down to bacteria.
Bacteria in food do two things. They reproduce, and they produce waste. The more they reproduce, the more bacteria there are, which produce even more waste. The waste they produce is what makes us sick in many cases.
Being kept cold limits how quickly the bacteria reproduce, but it doesn’t entirely eliminate that, nor does it do much to slow down how much waste they produce. So they’re still producing waste, just not at an accelerating rate.
Now when you cook food and get it up to a certain temperature, you’re going to kill basically all the bacteria. This means there’s nothing to produce waste. But odds are it is not being moved from the cooking area to the fridge in a perfectly sanitary way, so it’ll pick up some more bacteria, but it’ll be limited to just the surface. This means it’ll take longer for that bacteria to have any significant effect, which is why cooking and then fridging gives it a new lease on life.
Latest Answers