UKC

Chefs and other people in catering still insist on trying to serve duck only partly cooked - a restaurant owner in Armagnac all but rolled his eyes up when I asked for mine bien cuit last month - yet our own Food Standards Agency insists it should be properly cooked through. Any thoughts?

In reply to Tom Valentine:

You're paying for it, they should cook it how you want.

In reply to Tom Valentine:

It depends where you get your duck. Well raised healthy (until it was killed) duck is perfectly safe, and a dam site tastier rare (with crisp skin)

In reply to Tom Valentine:

75 degrees C is enough to kill campalobactor so I'd want it cooked enough to reach that.  Easier at home I suppose.  

 

In reply to Tom Valentine:

Leave the poor duck alone?

In reply to balmybaldwin:

That's what the chefs say, so how come the FSA disagree.?

Is it just a case of the nanny state playing it safe or is there a lot of duck on sale which is as unhealthy as chicken?

I've always been puzzled by the assumption that free range ducks live healthily because they seem to spend most of their time waddling around in a slurry of mud and their own shit.

In reply to Tom Valentine:

I don’t think it’s the lifestyle as much as the length of the supply chain.

If you have a professional chef sourcing fresh duck it’s going to be cooked shortly after slaughter.

one that has been packaged, chilled (or frozen for some supermarkets) then purchased for home and spent every day up to the use-by date in a fridge set a degree or so too warm will likely give you food poisoning unless well cooked. 

In reply to Tom Valentine:

Cultural differences. Brits are generally very priggish about food, it was an eye opener for me to get pork served up still bleeding all over the plate. Chicken and most offal are now the only things I insist on being totally cooked. I’m pretty cavalier about everything else. Rare duck and pork is a revelation in flavour and texture.  Only had the odd toilet emergency...

In reply to Removed UserStuart en Écosse:

Tapeworm, anyone

 

What about pheasant which some say should be hung until the maggots are crawling.

Certainly if I've acquired a fresh pheasant, either shot or road kill, I always hang it for three of four days.

In reply to krikoman:

Aren't the tapeworms from pork particularly nasty, I have eaten it raw but certainly wouldn't do it from choice! 

 

In reply to Tom Valentine:

I suspect it's fine if you are fit and healthy you will recover and survive.  

But I'd rather not.  

In reply to Tom Valentine:

Some chefs will be coming at it from a gastronomic point of view, FSA will be coming at it purely from a public health point of view. 

As others have said it should be possible to have meat safe and rare, but this is very hard to measure and control.

From a food safety point of view it is a lot easier to control and measure if you just say everything needs to be cooked throughout to 75c.

In reply to Tom Valentine:

'properly cooked through' and 'partially cooked' are pretty ambiguous terms, aren't they ? 'cooked through' is not the same as 'well done'.

In reply to GrahamD:

Probably not, especially in countries whose "well done" is different from the English version.

In reply to Tom Valentine:

The customer; and your wife.

T.

In reply to Tom Valentine:

The difference is that "free range shit waddlers" have a working immune system, unlike the inmates of the poultry concentration camps. Industrial poultry farming really is the worst kind of animal production in terms of animal welfare, much worse even than intensive pork production.

CB

In reply to cb294: Indeed. if they're organic free range shit waddlers, the person eating them is quids in healthy eating wise.

 

In reply to Reach>Talent:

yes, they are, and some fish one's are worse, they can end up in your brain, which can't be a good thing.

In reply to Timmd:

It is a question of sourcing good food, not so much of price. We buy free range ducks and chickens (not organic certified, but running free in a orchard with a little pond at the bottom) off a former student of my MIL. Prices are roughly the same as for the supermarket stuff. The only drawback is that essentially we have to buy whenever he has some animals on offer, otherwise there is a queue of people wanting to jump in ahead of us.

Same deal with the goose for Christmas. Buying direct from a local part time farm is cheaper than going to the supermarket.

CB