Just eight per cent of recipes mentioned cooking food to a certain temperature, but not all the temperatures were accurate
COOKBOOKS are apopular go-to on how to cook a tasty meal because, lets face it, we cant all be master chefs.
But they offer little advice on how to prepare food safely and the advice they do provide is often inaccurate, experts have warned.
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In fact, just eight per cent of recipes reviewed in a recent study mentioned cooking food to a certain temperate to minimise the risk of food poisoning.
But not all the temperatures listed were actually high enough to reduce the risk of foodborne illnesses, like salmonella.
Senior author Ben Chapman, fromNorth Carolina State University, said: Cookbooks arent widely viewed as a primary source of food-safety information, but cookbook sales are strong and theyre intended to be instructional.
Cookbooks tell people how to cook, so we wanted to see if cookbooks were providing any food-safety information related to cooking meat, poultry, seafood or eggs, and whether they were telling people to cook in a way that could affect the risk of contracting foodborne illness.
In other words, very few recipes provided relevant food-safety information, and 34 of those 123 recipes gave readers information that wasnt safe.
Put another way, only 89 out of 1,497 recipes gave readers reliable information that they could use to reduce their risk of foodborne illness.
Chapman and his team analysed 1,497 recipes from 29 cookbooks that appeared on the New York Times best sellers list for food and diet books.
They looked at three things; does the recipe tell readers to cook the dish to a certain temperature, is that temperature a safe temperature, and does the recipe promote food-safety myths.
One of those myths is tocook poultry until the juices run clear, which has been proven unreliable as a way of determining if the dish has reached a safe temperature.
Almost 100 per cent of recipes gave readers subjective indicators to determine when a dish had finished cooking and none were found to be reliable.
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Lead author Katrina Levine, said: The most common indicator was cooking time, which appeared in 44 percent of the recipes.
And cooking time is particularly unreliable, because so many factors can affect how long it takes to cook something: the size of the dish being cooked, how cold it was before going into the oven, differences in cooking equipment, and so on.
Other common indicators used in the cookbooks included references to the colour or texture of the meat, as well as vague language such as cook until done.
Levine added: This is important because cooking meat, poultry, seafood and eggs to a safe internal temperature kills off pathogens that cause foodborne illness.
These temperatures were established based on extensive research, targeting the most likely pathogens found in each food.
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Chapman concluded: Ideally, cookbooks can help us make food tasty and reduce our risk of getting sick, so wed like to see recipes include good endpoint cooking temperatures.
A similar study was done 25 years ago and found similar results so nothing has changed in the past quarter century.
But by talking about these new results, were hoping to encourage that change.
If you want to know the safe cooking temperatures for your recipes you can foodsafety.gov.
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Originally posted here:
Your COOKBOOKS could be making you sick, experts warn - The Sun
