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Suzie's Tips ... Delicious Food and Keeping it Safe |
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Suzie's Tips ... Delicious Food and Keeping it Safe |
Dangers of Dehydrating Meat and Poultry without Proper TemperaturesI hope your day is going just the way you want it to. I have a long, several topic post today on dehydration ( drying of meats) Enjoy!! The danger in dehydrating meat and poultry without cooking it to a safe temperature first is that the appliance will not heat the meat to 160 °F – a temperature at which bacteria are destroyed – before it dries. After drying, bacteria become much more heat resistant. Within a dehydrator or low-temperature oven, evaporating moisture absorbs most of the heat. Thus, the meat itself does not begin to rise in temperature until most of the moisture has evaporated. Therefore, when the dried meat temperature finally begins to rise, the bacteria have become more heat resistant and are more likely to survive. If these surviving bacteria are pathogenic, they can cause foodborne illness to those consuming the jerky. We don't want that right? let's make it spicy! Staying Safe and Heating To Proper Temps BEFORE Drying Meats Illnesses due to Salmonella and E. coli O157:H7 from homemade jerky raise questions about the safety of traditional drying methods for making beef and venison jerky. The USDA Meat and Poultry Hotline’s current recommendation for making jerky safely is to heat meat to 160 °F before the dehydrating process. This step assures that any bacteria present will be destroyed by wet heat. But most dehydrator instructions do not include this step, and a dehydrator may not reach temperatures high enough to heat meat to 160 °F. After heating to 160 °F, maintaining a constant dehydrator temperature of 130 to 140 °F during the drying process is important because: the process must be fast enough to dry food before it spoils; and it must remove enough water that microorganisms are unable to grow. See you later. Suzie Eating Well Food Blog Posted: Tuesday 11th January 2005, 12:24 AM |