Chicken and Salmonella - Some Basic Safety Guidelines - By: rwakefield

Recently, the perils of Salmonella, especially from cooking chicken, have been mentioned so much in the media most people would have thought that incidences of infection to have reduced significantly. Sadly this is not what has happened. For people who eat chicken, the risks of getting ill or worse are far higher than they should be, and thousands of people are infected every year.

Knowing exactly what Salmonella is will help chefs reduce the dangers and avoid illness or worse.

What Exactly is Salmonella?
Put simply, it is a form of food poisoning caused by a specific bacteria that lives in people, birds and other animals.
For those who get salmonella, they may suffer from feverishness, diarrhea, being physically sick (ie regurgitating) and extreme stomach cramps. This may begin within 12 hours after consuming the infected poultry and can last along as 3 days. Normally, sufferers make a full recovery naturally, but in some cases, it can be a lot worse, requiring hospitalisation and in a few cases, even death.

Avoiding Salmonella

The advice given to cooks is :

* Clean your hands AND the chicken before before cooking.
Salmonella can exist on your hands and also on the hands of anybody else how has touched the chicken. Cleaning thoroughly reduces the risks.

* Keep raw chicken away from anything on the kitchen counter.
When preparing a chicken meal, cross contamination is a major hazard. To reduce the risk, do not use the same cutting utensils for raw chicken as is used for cutting vegetables. Also, use one cutting board for the chicken and another fo the vegetables.

If you follow these precautions, cooking with chicken is perfectly safe and has benefits fro your general health,

Assuming you are now feeling a little more upbeat about buying and cooking chicken, here are a few other things to consider to make your chicken meals more healthy and tasty.

Nowadays there are many benefits to buying 'free-range' chickens or even totally organic chickens. Even the high street grocery stores are starting to sell 'organic' or 'free-range' chicken, so gettiing hold of it is easier than ever. This is a good thing because many of us are now aware that the larger chicken farms are simply looking for a profit and not looking out for the health and wellbeing of their poultry, or the end consumers. The name, 'free-range' is usually more familiar to people seeking to have a healthier eating lifestyle - it requires the chickens to have access to the open air and be allowed to wander around and eat naturally instead of being restricted to a small pen, or stuffed into a barn with thousands of others. Free range chickens live a happier and stress free life, and this results in a taster meat, and a cleaner conscience for the consumer.

Organic chickens, which may also be 'free range', have the extra restriction that they are not pumped with antibiotics, hormones, herbicides or pesticides. Many people believe that both Free-range and organice chickens taste better and are juicier.

Did you know that organic chicken breasts only have 10 fat calories, 110 thigh calories and a whole chicken only has 130 calories?
If you are trying to lose weight, that has to be good news, right?

If you are an athlete or body builder and are trying to increase protein levels, free-range chicken breasts have 22 grams, thighs have 19 grams and the whole chicken has 21 grams - all of that from a meat that is cheap and tasty!

About the Author

Roger is a web developer who provides nutritional support and food related content for Recipes 4U, which has over forty thousand recipes with sections for Beef Recipes, Baking Recipes and Vegetable Recipes.

Article Directory Source: http://www.articlerich.com/profile/rwakefield/49582

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