I feel like this page should have a warning, the fantastic Youtuber Ann Reardon investigated lots of cooking "hacks" to see if they were food safe, and she worked out that cooking salmon in a dishwasher does not bring it up to a food safe temperature. [1]
Side note - in a different video she also did debunking on other food hacks and ended up investigating Russian bot networks who uploads both food hacks for hits and then slips in propaganda.
It's one of the best and strangest and best Youtube channels, it has the appearance of a fun cooking channel, and often, 90% of the time, is exactly that, but then occasionally slips into some fascinating areas like, for example, global coco production lines and exploitation.
Off the top of my head over the years she has also uncovered some very strange child exploitation videos where the audio is different to the content. She has also almost definitely saved a huge amount of lives with her fractal wood burning debunking videos [2].
It's a little off topic but I thought you all here would find it interesting that a Youtube channel called How To Cook That with cookies and cakes as it's logo has done all of the above [3].
I disagree with her conclusion. Raw salmon has no inherent pathogens of interest. People eat salmon raw at sushi bars. I’d be pretty unconcerned about the food safety issue. (Like any food there’s some risk of cross contamination, but that’s so rare.)
As someone who has dealt with food safety (both as a hobbyist and professionally) a lot I can tell you most of what you read is based on government recommendations, which are designed to keep the dumbest and unhealthiest people from hurting themselves. The government doesn’t get thanked when you eat delicious, not-overcooked food but they do get blamed when people get sick, so their incentive is to tell you to overcook everything. There’s no reason you need to get that thanksgiving turkey to 165 or whatever the hell they recommend, but they do it because they know a lot of people will measure the turkey in the wrong spot so if they told you the actual 145 a lot of people would be eating breasts that never got close to 130.
I don’t know why you’d want to cook your salmon in the dishwasher, but the time/temp is absolutely fine for anyone not immunocompromised.
So I would say that her video showed that it doesn’t bring it up to the temperature recommended by (I assume) the FDA, but not that it is unsafe, as those are two very different things.
> People eat salmon raw at sushi bars. I’d be pretty unconcerned about the food safety issue.
That's because other people have prepared the fish for you. [0]
> Sushi-grade fish must be frozen before being consumed, to further prevent any of those food-borne illnesses, and this is usually done via flash freezing, sometimes immediately after sushi-grade salmon, for example, is caught.
The freezing is only because of parasites, not microbes. It doesn’t kill microbes. Practically all of the fish you purchase is actually sushi grade, having been flash frozen on the boat, it is a meaningless term. If you go to a restaurant, supply store, or a fish wholesaler, you will have a hard time finding any fish that is commonly consumed as sushi that isn’t labeled sushi grade. It’s like how nearly everything that doesn’t have wheat in it is labeled gluten-free, it isn’t because they did something special.
Her temperature charts show it getting well above 140°F, which is the temperature at which all of the parasites die, and they do not form spores or come back later. So it is completely safe in that regard also.
So has the raw salmon at the grocery store. You’d have a hard time buying fish that hasn’t been previously frozen, you just don’t know it because grocery stores thaw it before it goes into the display case.
> You’d have a hard time buying fish that hasn’t been previously frozen
Maybe in some places but nor all. Raw salmon is fresh when sold. Most of this fishes are domestic. It does not have sense economically to spend energy freezing a product that you can kill and put in the market by plane the same day.
Also there would be a problem with re-freezing a frozen fish. Sushi bars store the products in a special ultrafreeze storage,for some time. They are obliged by law to do this.
Farmed salmon can be sold never frozen for sushi. Wild can’t. It is one of the few fish that can be purchased that way because it has very low incidence of parasites.
But still her own graph showed it was well above 140C (the temperature at which parasites are all dead) and she was talking entirely about microbes.
So even if you purchased Never frozen farmed salmon and cooked it this way, you’d be very safe. Even if you didn’t cook it at all you’d be very safe, as evidenced by the fact that the government allows it.
Say what you want about our government’s food regulations, they are not at all risk tolerant.
I wouldn’t want to cook salmon in a dishwasher, but I wouldn’t hesitate to eat it for food safety reasons, and her video made me less concerned, not more.
> Sushi bars store the products in a special ultrafreeze storage,for some time. They are obliged by law to do this.
Maybe in Spain, this is not required by the restaurant in the US, some jurisdictions require recordkeeping to prove their suppliers froze this for them (NYC) and most source from a parasite-free supplier but the restaurant itself only needs to maintain safe storage temperature. The FDA guidelines are enforced by local health jurisdictions in the US and may not be in complete alignment. More on it: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/08/nyregion/sushi-fresh-from...
Also I don’t think sushi restaurants typically have any special freezers for this. You can reach the required level in a regular commercial freezer. -4F for one week. Any commercial freezer gets that cold, and that step is taken by the wholesalers anyway for any sushi that requires it.
I looked into this awhile back. While you're correct about previous freezing this is about mitigating microbe risk, not parasite destruction. The FDA has a specification that the fish must be frozen down to in order to ensure destruction of parasites. (I couldn't find a direct link to the FDA's guideline, here's one from MN that's the same: https://www.health.state.mn.us/communities/environment/food/... )
Ahi Tuna and most farmed Atlantic salmon (Norway is especially safe: https://web.archive.org/web/20200426100625/https://nifes.hi.... ) have low to no parasite risk. However, I would not buy and eat wild salmon sashimi without at least freezing for a week first. Even retailers as big as Costco don't have freezers meeting the guideline.
I think any fish requiring such freezing likely would have been frozen to spec before it got to Costco or any restaurants. I’ve never asked any of the seafood purveyors I know about it, but I do know you can buy the stuff from them and use it immediately. I don’t trust the government for much but when it comes to being overly regulatory on food safety they’re pretty tough to beat. If it’s being sold ready to use I’m sure it was processed before, and there’s a HACCP plan in place to ensure it.
Ha. I don’t think it’s even true. I mean it wouldn’t surprise me if some sushi restaurant somewhere had such things, but restaurant supply companies don’t sell extra cold freezers. Seafood wholesalers might have such things but I’d wager the vast majority of sushi restaurants are using regular freezers.
Sushi in the us has to be held at -20C for 7 days, or -35C for 15 hours. They absolutely sell extra cold freezers that go to that temperature. Your home freezer won't.
> I’d wager the vast majority of sushi restaurants are using regular freezers.
After the 7 days at -20 the fish can just be transferred to a regular freezer. So you're right, most places probably don't have the special freezer in house.
Correct, however they do exist and some higher-end restaurants use them. Places usually advertise them as 'super freezers' that operate at -60C, some of the michelin star type restaurants go deeper with medical cryocoolers. It's becoming more common now that places like NYC have a regulation requiring freezing (where before a restaurant could just source from a parasite-free supplier).
Yeah I’m sure they exist and LeBernardin has them but they have to be extremely uncommon. The sushi restaurant industry just has to be reliant on that step taking place at the distributor level or even somewhere before.
Raw meaning uncooked. Almost all the salmon you buy was previously frozen, but it’s still raw. Besides, her temperature chart showed it well above the point where parasites die.
I was contrasting it to things like smoked salmon which have had listeria issues due to poor processing.
Almost everyone misunderstands the recommendations. 165 F is only meant to be held for 1 second. To achieve the same level of pathogen reduction, you can trade temperature for time.
No, nobody misunderstands them. The recommendations leave out time entirely. People aren’t misunderstanding them, they’re just overly simplified. That’s why they’re bad. You are correct that you can do lower temperatures for longer, but FDA guidelines don’t mention this.
“The safe cooking temperature for all poultry products, including ground chicken and turkey, stays the same at 165 ºF.”
These are the same guidelines you encounter in the restaurant world, however in packaged food production you submit your recipes to process authorities who actually do consult time/temperature charts. But for restaurant and home guidelines they assume (not incorrectly) that it is basically impossible to ensure the restaurant or home chef cooked the chicken until the coolest part was at 145 for 2 minutes or whatever TF time/temp is needed to get the required salmonella reduction.
I didn't mean to say that recommendations give explicit alternatives. A temperature recommendation without explicit time is implicitly instantaneous, and without explicit location is implicitly at the coldest spot. From that, you can infer that the recommendation might be overkill, but not by how much.
I didn't know that they officially reduced the temperature and added a rest time, despite the article announcing the changes being over a decade old, so thank you for the link. I'm curious if it was in response to something like so many people ignoring the recommendation that they were getting sick, or if the baked ham industry advocated for it.
> and she worked out that cooking salmon in a dishwasher does not bring it up to a food safe temperature.
That video was great! Although I notice she cooks it in a large jar of water. I suspect that it would take a long time to heat up all that water, hence it never reaches 62°C. Whereas if you just wrapped it in foil, it might transfer that heat to the fish much quicker.
Yeah, I think the key take away would be, if you do cook salmon in a dishwasher, in foil or in a jar, the first time you do it use a heat probe and graph to confirm it goes into the bacteria killing hot-zone for the correct amount of time. She also mentions heat resistant spores, so it should be eaten as soon as it comes out of your dishwasher. Once you’ve done one run and confirmed it’s ok, I expect you don’t need to do the temperature probe the next time.
You do not need to cook salmon to any temperature. They don’t inherently have food-borne pathogens. People eat it raw. Most salmon-related illnesses come from processed salmon (like smoked) where cross contamination introduces listeria.
Also, most bacteria actually begin to die at around 130F, which her chart I think shows it gets well above. (It looks like it gets into the low 60s, which is well above that.)
Also I’m pretty sure the only food-borne pathogen that forms spores is clostridium botulinum, and that’s not found in fish.
Also, its very important to run your sink to full hot temp prior to starting the washer. (in 99% of dishwashers, they pull from the hotwater supply to the kitchen sink. Dishwashers will do a ~15 minute pre-spray (without soap) initial rinse. If you dont pre-warm the sink line, then the dishwasher will start with a cold pre-wash, thus will not put dishes to temp as quickly in the cycle.
Y'all with your fancy 220v electricity can get it hot a lot faster. In America where your dishwasher can only pull 1,800 w you have to hook it up to hot water.
I believe most modern dishwashers simply sense the incoming water temp though and basically just pump the water through until they get to hot water.
Ann Reardon's channel definitely has lessons for the HN startup crowd - definitely a case of "when life gives you lemons, make lemonade".
Her channel was originally a high quality baking channel, but then she did a video titled "Is So Yummy the worst channel on YouTube?" or something like that. It basically highlighted how all these "hands and pans" content farms just have these sped up, interesting to look at videos, but their actual "recipes" were total nonsense. Most importantly, she highlighted how these channels were basically killing the view counts of real baker's on YouTube. I'm sure she saw that these debunking videos were here most popular ones (nothing addicts like outrage) and she leaned hard into it.
The sad corollary is that her original premise was so right - so many video algorithms end up just promoting these flashy, "bright colors and good music" type of videos. People always say "TikTok is so addictive", but I find it addictive the way a room full of cotton candy is addictive to a 3 year old. I can hardly stand modern content sites (of lots of different variants) because it's the mental equivalent of empty carbs.
It's bizarre to me how shallow it stays and how do much of the content just tries to trick the consumer. On Instagram I constantly see travel photos and clips with no indication of where the location is. Videos of weird stuff happening sand if you read comments, you learn it's fake or important context that makes it interesting kiss omitted. How does anyone consume this without getting annoyed about these unanswered, basic questions and keep consuming it after you learn it's all fake?
I added a safety section. YouTube generally isn't considered a reliable source for Wikipedia but I think they make exceptions sometimes. If not, hopefully someone will complain and add info from a more reliable source.
PS: I can't wait to check back tomorrow and see how being at the top of HN impacted the page views. Interesting that it had a small bump in views on Tuesday (probably posted/mentioned somehwere popular) and now a few days later showing up on the top of HN.
Well it looks like the salmon needs to be above 63C for 15 seconds to kill the bacteria, and eaten soon after cooking to mitigate bacteria spores that may grow days after. That's what she says in the video anyway, but I can't find a source for that, might be worth adding to wikipida? Hey if it stops a few people getting ill then it's worth it.
> it looks like the salmon needs to be above 63C for 15 seconds to kill the bacteria
I guess if you like overcooked salmon.
Food safe temperatures aren't a hard line. Bacteria die off at much lower temperatures than 65ºC (from around 54ºC). What does change with temperature is the rate at which bacteria die. The usual safety goal is to get a 6.5 log10 reduction in bacteria.
The reason that 65ºC is usually chosen as a safe temperature is because once you reach that temperature the time to reach that reduction is very short (about 1.5minutes), at 70ºC it's instantaneous.
At lower temperatures, you have to keep the food at that temperature for a longer amount of time (there are reference charts to be found online[1]). For this to be safe you have to be able to measure and/or control the temperature reliably. This is obviously more difficult to do than just cooking to a specific temperature. In many commercial applications it's just easier to cook to a high enough temperature to not have to worry about it.
There are also other ways to kill the bacteria. I usually cure salmon overnight in the fridge (2:1 ratio brown sugar and salt) before smoking it to 54ºC. The temperature doesn't kill the bacteria but the curing does.
Yeah it's tricky isn't it, I guess if you're cooking with a new kitchen tool, in this case a dishwasher, I think it's reasonable to say it may take little while to figure out that exact combo of safe and perfectly cooked. I think my recommendation to you would be when you're cooking in the dishwasher err on the side of safety. The maybe experiment from there, perhaps a lemon dishwasher tablet would add a zing.
Ann Reardon is great, she debunks so much stuff. I didn't even realise how many fake cooking videos there were out there until I started watching her channel
Thank you. I have trouble believing I would eat food prepared in a dishwasher, especially with the suggestion that you could do so while also washing dishes.
There are other stories in this discussion that are similarly fun but should not necessarily be taken as good advice on how to prepare food. Of course, the devil is in the details and maybe it works for one person because they know how to make it work but without explaining a lot more than is mentioned here, you can't necessarily know if it was really safe.
Please don't go off half-cocked and risk your health because of people sharing fun stories here.
> Side note - in a different video she also did debunking on other food hacks and ended up investigating Russian bot networks who uploads both food hacks for hits and then slips in propaganda.
This reminds me of a food video I haven't been able to find for years; a dude was doing the Gordon Ramsey recipe for scrambled eggs, he then slipped in a 2 minute rant about money being worthless and the need to buy gold.
He had a replacement for Creme Fraiche, which was useful as Creme Fraiche didn't exist where I lived at the time, but I thought the interlude was so bizarre that I never bookmarked it.
Some populations have more parasites than other. Sashimi is cut in fine translucent lames in part for easing to spot the parasites (or more precisely to verify the absence of parasites).
But if you're using the freezing method, the parasites will still be there but be dead. Using modern methods, it seems any species of salmon is safe to use for sashimi. Some are just more palatable than others.
If the parasites are visible my understanding is that is not sashimi grade meat and would be smoked or processed in several ways instead. I assume that Japanese would assure to remove any undesirable aspect in the meat before to make the fish and serve it just because would ruin aesthetics. I could be wrong.
Just for aesthetics, maybe in Japan. In the US, there's no standard for sashimi grade fish. So there's no real difference between most fish marked sashimi grade vs most IQF.
That's my rule also. I'm mostly pescetarian, and don't eat freshwater fish neither raw or cooked. Even some salt-water fish is not recommended to eat raw.
But frequently even fishmongers and chefs themselves don't know the exact spicies of the fish they selling or serving. There is so much of mislabeling in that industry, so it's impossible to know without DNA testing.
I encountered even some celebrity chefs preparing raw dishes from freshwater fish.
Some even doing it to save money, knowing that it may cause liver cancer to their customers.
It's not that eating raw freshwater fish will always lead to the health problems, the fish should be from an endemic region, but it's still a lottery.
This simply isn't true. Some things are perfectly safe cooked but unsafe when raw. Pork is a good example of this: Folks get parasites from undercooked pork. (I'm sure there are others, I just know this with pork). Cooking meat saves live and helps prevent food-born illnesses.
Heck, this isn't even true with vegetables. Kidney beans need to be properly cooked so they aren't toxic. One kidney bean is enough to cause stomach distress. This is the reason you shouldn't cook raw kidney beans in a slow cooker - they need boiled. Other legumes have this toxin, but in lesser amounts so it isn't as important and as such, safe with most cooking methods.
Do you want to eat those parasites after they are cooked? That is what I'm trying to say: I don't want to eat food that has bacteria, worms and parasites - even if they are killed by cooking. That is disgusting.
I don't know how many times I've heard people say they need to cook their meat well or need the restaurant to cook it well to kill those parasites. Don't buy meat you don't trust the quality of! Don't go to restaurants where you think the meat has parasites!
Instead of repeating things by habit that they've been told, why can't people stop and think about what they are doing?
It isn't about trusting the quality, but about knowing what sort things are normal in foods and treating food safely. You simply cannot avoid certain things, but you can do things that cut down or eliminate risks.
And one of those things is to simply not eat raw meat. It isn't about 'trust' but reality. You aren't going to know about the parasites, and the risk is mitigated through cooking. A lot of food-born pathogens are like this.
Put in another light: We pasteurize milk. Despite our best practices, raw milk will always pose a risk of severe food-born illness. The prudent answer isn't to 'find milk you trust' - it is all like this. The prudent answer is to drink pasteurized milk.
Same with meat. Properly cook your meat. Don't eat wild salmon raw if it hasn't been frozen. And so on. You can apply the same stuff to all food - none of it is 100% safe, and you simply won't be able to verify where it all came from. You won't be able to tell by looking or how much you trust the farmer that grew it.
Thank you! I take care of what I eat and haven't had any food-related problems in many years. I'd rather skip a meal, buy something else, or go somewhere else, than buy something I think is infested.
As for pork meat, I prefer mine medium rare. There are regions and countries that have effectively exterminated pork-born parasites since decades, there is virtually no risk at all for getting parasites from pork within these regions. If you live in a region or country where this is not the case, you shouldn't buy pork meat at all. The parasites are still there, even if you kill them by cooking them. Do you want to eat that?
Raw salmon is one story. Salmon stored in a lukewarm dishwasher for 2-3 hours, neither cold enough to prevent the growth of bacteria nor hot enough to kill them, is a different story. Imagine a piece of sushi left on the shelf all afternoon in the summer in Phoenix, AZ!
That thought popped into my head as well, but I wonder if the raw salmon you get in sushi is fresher or prepared differently to buying it in a supermarket?
Yes, the "raw" fish that you eat without cooking it, is actually first left for a long time in a special freezer that brings it to a very low temperature to kill bacteria and parasites.
To my knowledge, this is not the case for salmon. Whereas wild salmon is not safe to eat raw unless it has been frozen, this should not be necessary for farm-raised salmon of the highest quality.
It doesn't have to be a long time if it's a special freezer. You can use a regular deep freezer (non-defrosting) for a longer time. I believe the protocol is something like -30F for 1 day, or -5F for 14 days.
You should probably remove your guess or provide a source. If people are seriously dumb enough to “cook” with a dishwasher, someone is probably going to also take your guess at face value.
Maybe you should provide a source for your guess that my statement is a guess, or remove it. Maybe you could Google first?
What you will find is that there are multiple sources with slightly differing times, even from reputable agencies. What I have stated is actually on the conservative side. Here's one source that is on the faster side.
We would just get an entire salmon from the market and make cerviche out of it. There is always a risk with raw food, but it always seems like Americans are very scared of parasites and "natural".
For instance the eggs need to be stored in the fridge because they are dipped in checmicals, the rest of the world is fine without doing that. Same with chlorine in the water, it's not necessary.
> For instance the eggs need to be stored in the fridge because they are dipped in chemicals, the rest of the world is fine without doing that.
It's fairly common in parts of Europe to store eggs in the fridge too, not because they have to be stored in the fridge (like American eggs do), but because it makes them stay fresh longer.
Grew up in a country town and free range eggs from the farm/house gate keep for a surprisingly long time - at least a month.
Regardless of the source I always crack it in a mug to give it a sniff first because you never know when you'll get a bad one the slipped through the cracks
This is not true : eggs in Europe have an expiration date of 28 days (without fridge) and there’s still a fair safety margin.
My lack of organisation gave me several times the opportunity to try eggs stores eggs longer than that - maybe 50days - and never had a problem. The only outdated egg I can remember (they are easy to notice by smell !) was “fresh”, strait from the shop, probably small cracks in the shell…
Here in Norway we're fighting the 28-day rule[1], since our eggs are low on salmonella and the eggs are kept cold from producer to consumer.
Apparently tests have been done here and found our eggs were perfectly fine in a cake after a year in the fridge[2], but the taste of the egg itself changed a bit after 7 months. YMMV...
Maybe you’re in a more remote area? The eggs I buy usually have at least 3 weeks before their BB date. Sometimes they’re only 2-3 days old if I’m lucky. I usually try to buy the freshest eggs I can find as they poach better.
I've personally kept eggs unrefrigerated in the tropics for more than 30 days. You just have to flip them every couple of days to keep the shell from drying out inside and cracking. These were eggs purchased in Panama before a sailing trip. You can't do this with US eggs though, as others have pointed out, because the shells are cleaned up (from chicken poop) and polished, removing the protective surface in the process.
In the UK and Europe, the “best before” date printed on eggs is 28 days from when it was laid. This assumes room temperature storage. Refrigeration can extend storage life beyond this date.
American eggs are prepared differently before they are taken to the store, they are polished and they remove the protective residue which then requires refrigeration. That’s why Americans do it.
I don't live in the US so "you guys" is a bit presumptive, but I'm sure there are plenty of things Americans would find odd about other countries as well.
Note that ceviche is a different class of "raw" than e.g. sushi, in that the lime juice does kill _some_ (but not all) parasites. According to https://honest-food.net/ceviche-recipe-safety-parasites-2/, fresh farmed salmon is ok to eat raw, while pacific salmon is pretty risky, on the basis of it being susceptible to seal worm. The article mentions a long freeze (at -4F) being an acceptable way to kill off those parasites before consumption.
To get sick once I don't mind, Im more afraid of those parasites the live with you without noticing. But most Salmon in Europe is transported frozen from Norway before being sold. Even though farmed Salmon comes with it's own problems.
> the eggs need to be stored in the fridge because they are dipped in checmicals, the rest of the world is fine without doing that
Also one of the main reasons for chlorine-washing eggs is to reduce the instance of salmonella. But the salmonella is only there because the US will not pass regulation requiring farmers to vaccinate hens, as Europe does.
Not really. Farmed salmon and tuna are basically safe, because there are FDA controls around how they have to be frozen before they can be sold, which ensures that parasites die. Other fish are basically down to your risk tolerance.
There's just so much misinformation out there about food safety it's insane. If you understand basic hygiene and aren't immunocompromised, there's really not much need to be so terrified of food.
I make my own sushi at home. I get individually quick frozen filets and freeze them below -5F for about 2 weeks. This way I know they've been through the process.
Unfortunately, salmon can contain parasites that we are not resistant too.
It is much safer to freeze even fresh caught salmon. If you are eating raw salmon at a commercial establishment, like a sushi restaurant, it was frozen.
My dad once cooked in the engine of the car driving to a lake. Wrapped in foil. Was a veggie burger. They got cooked, haha but they had a very strong cartaste, I kept it with one bite.
Depending on where you are in the world, the salmon you eat raw isn't the same as the salmon you eat cooked. There are extra requirements around sashimi grade salmon such as flash freezing to kill parasites.
The risk profile is not the same as eating undercooked salmon that is not intended for raw consumption.
Also depending on where you are all available salmon could be flash frozen and considered safe without cooking.
Depending on where you are the salmon might be less likely to contain parasites and your government food hygiene institution might not consider raw salmon unsafe.
My point is that the original comment seems like US-defaultism.
I'd rather say it depends on the source of the fish. In some parts of the world the salmon has parasites, and needs to be either cooked or frozen before it's considered safe to consume. Salmon from other places can however be consumed raw.
But warming salmon to a temperature where bacteria grow best, and fastest, and then not heating it enough to kill bacteria, is not the same as raw salmon or cooked salmon.
Bacteria appear when preparing the meal. A salmon, uncut, is internally sorta safe, but once cut open, bacteria is introduced.
This is why you don't see cuts of salmon for sale, at room temp. You see cleaned salmon on ice, or in a fridge.
This is a good point. Do bacteria multiply so fast at the right conditions that this would already have an effect during the time it takes to cook + eat the meal?
C'mon raw meat is one of the absolute best types of food. Beef tartare is great, although in most places I'd not have it home prepared, yet I'd trust most restaurants willing to put in a menu [or 'cooked' if asked directly in the kitchen]
Probably, and the fish would leak oils. The dishwasher would smell like fish for some time also and your meat would smell like detergent. This is some "Q-mamon grade" advice, only to be taken seriously by the very dumb or very naive.
My father was a construction worker, running his own crew and company, and often worked with hot mix asphalt.
He is also a recreational fisherman.
He would catch a salmon, filet it, wrap it tightly with butter, aromatics and lemons in several layers of tin foil, and bury it in the middle of the truck full of hot mix asphalt. When they reached the fish, it was time for lunch.
Less dramatically, when I lived in Germany, where I had radiators for heat, I stored baby bottles of water on top of the kitchen radiator. It kept the water the perfect temperature for my infant with zero risk of it being too hot, so zero risk of scalding. All I had to do was add powdered formula when he got hungry.
Against: Nothing really, I guess the baby might not drink it (in theory they’re expecting warm breast milk). It’s not recommended to use straight tap water here, only filtered, due to bacteria which is harmless to older children/adults but could be a problem for a newborn.
> It’s not recommended to use straight tap water here, only filtered, due to bacteria which is harmless to older children/adults but could be a problem for a newborn.
I’m very currious about the filter you mention. How do you filter bacteria out in a household setting? How do you keep the filter itself clean and how do you QA your solution?
I find it likely that any filtering done by average people is more likely to add bacteria than to remove it. But maybe there is some magical method I don’t know about yet.
I read the linked NHS document multiple times and I can't see any reference to filtered water. They only talk about boiling the water. Where are you seeing that they recommend filtering?
Because of two reasons together: charcoal filters don’t remove bacteria[1][2], that is the reason why I don’t expect it to reduce bacterial count. And then any user error (less than pristine pitcher, filter not replaced at the recomended interval) would increase the count.
But there is also a different reasoning. A more philosophical, heuristic based one: The water where I live is treated by professionals with professional grade equipment. They also take regular samples and try to grow the bacteria to be able to tell if they are doing their job right or not. And the quality, at least where I live, is generally good. To improve something from good to excelent you often need to put in as much work as it was already put in to move it from mediocre to good. It is possible of course, but I would expect the process to be either energy intensive, or fiddly, or resource intensive, or require even more specialised equipment. Most likely all four at once. A simple, easy to use, and convenient filter doesn’t pass my sniff test. Like if it is that easy why wouldn’t the pros just do it at the water treatment facility?
Now of course this is just a heuristic, it can go wrong many different ways. And I admit I can be wrong of course. This is very far from my expertise. But this is how I was thinking about the question.
For infants this is not food safe. The powder should be mixed with water that is at least 70C to kill bacteria that might be present in the powder.
For older babies (6+) then maybe not so important.
In the weaning period when I took over with a night bottle and the wife shut down her boobs I would just sleep with a pre-mixed (not from powder) formula pack next to my body. It would be more or less body temperature and the kiddo would like it :D
However some, in particular Emily Oster, argue that the risk is negligible and that having an overly complicated set of steps for tired parents to follow is counter-productive:
I left my original comment as a fun anecdote in response to another fun anecdote. In reality, I think it's probably not a good idea to cook food in hot asphalt but didn't feel that really needed to be said, so didn't say it. (How many people are even going to have the opportunity to try that?) Now I am feeling like perhaps it does need to be said and cringing in anticipation of people hating on me for saying it and thereby raining on their party.
I looked up the info rather than go "citation needed." My children are grown. They have already survived whatever mistakes I made in raising them and life has changed, so some of what I did worked just fine at the time but is no longer a good idea.
I provided citations and accurate information to the best of my ability and as neutrally as I knew how in the interest of promoting food safety for people currently or in the future in need of actually feeding babies.
I was quoting the staff at the hospital and took their word as granted. It also says so on the box of our Hipp formula powder box (the one meant for 0-6 month old kids).
I am also a bit pragmatic and think that it’s most likely not dangerous. But I liken it to using a seat belt. You don’t need it until you crash.
If I was unlucky and my kid got really sick because I was lazy with water handling I would feel bad.
Your second link makes a very strong argument against boiling water due to the minimal risk posed by unboiled water. Comparing it to putting your child in a car.
The recommendation appears to be just another attempt by the government to coddle and infantilize (no pun intended) their constituents.
I mean, it's not like they're making it illegal, or actually investigating people doing it. I think it's a great thing that we have governmental organizations that are dedicated towards understanding and disseminating health and safety information. I will agree that they can go too far but just recommending extra heating of water that goes into infant food on a website is ridiculously inconsequential when compared with actual governmental overreach. Someone doesnt want babies to die. I think as long as it stays in the realm of pure information and not legislation, it's much better to go a little to far than not far enough.
Unless of course you were being sarcastic, in which case i recommend denoting it as such.
Hijacking this thread to comment on a quote from the CDC article which I’ve also heard in a zillion other places:
> If you do decide to warm the bottle, never use a microwave. Microwaves heat milk and food unevenly, resulting in “hot spots” that can burn your baby’s mouth and throat.
This seems wrong to me. How can any fluid have a “hot spot”? Can’t you just, you know… swirl it a bit and let the temperature even out? Wouldn’t this take no more than 5 seconds?
I diligently followed this advice with my first child and had to wait 5+ minutes every time for my bottle warmer to warm up the milk, while he was crying with hunger and getting both of us stressed out. Now with my second child, I just toss it in the microwave for ~18 seconds for a 4oz bottle, and it’s fine. I swirl it for 5 seconds and drip it on my wrist to be sure.
I sometimes feel like recommendations like these are written for the most braindead possible person, who would put the milk in the microwave for 5 minutes to boiling and feed it to the baby without checking the temp first. I don’t see how the slightest bit of common sense couldn’t prevent any issues here.
Exactly, these types of things _are_ written for the dumbest people. Cause while we here a so cultured and educated (implicit sarcasm), the range of human intelligence goes at least as low. Insert anecdote about designing trash cans for State parks.
I have decorative boxes covering up my radiators. Incidentally, the boxes heat up to the perfect temperature for my cats, who love sitting on them in the winter.
I thought it was super cool at the time because I had never before had radiant heat. German apartments were different in myriad ways from my experience of American housing.
I think America could learn a lot from other cultures about improving quality of life just in terms of housing practices.
Yeah, the US is not a monolith by any stretch wrt heating type. I don't mean to conflate this one type of heating with my generally positive experience of housing in Germany just being overall better in myriad ways.
Bitumen contains polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. I believe the typical exposure via inhaling the fumes was researched with no link to cancer found but I have doubts about that fish.
The roofing of my primary school was under almost constant repair, so the smell of bitumen heaters was a common companion. Hardly experience it these days, but I loved that aroma - still do.
Breath deep, son! That sweet smell of bitumen heaters you loved as a kid? That's the scent of progress! Sure, you don't get to whiff it much these days, but let me tell you, back in my day, we'd huff that stuff like it was the lifeblood of invention. You see, in the world of scientific discovery, a little bit of bitumen goes a long way.
Now, I know what you're thinking: "Cave, isn't that dangerous?" Well, listen up, sport: science isn't all rainbows and unicorn farts. Sometimes, it's polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons! Those big, fancy words might scare the lab coats, but not us. We're the brave souls, the pioneers who push the boundaries and get our hands dirty.
That's the spirit we need to keep alive! Remember, fear has no place in the laboratory. If we're going to make the next big breakthrough, we've got to be willing to take a few risks. So what if we end up with a little cancer? A little cancer never hurt anyone! It's just another challenge for us to overcome in the name of progress.
Considering how many times he's survived cancer, I believe it probably does. He also smoked for ~50 years. The salmon was wrapped tightly enough with enough layers of tin foil there was no exposure to any tar in the food - cancer aside, it would be incredibly unpalatable.
I don't know about asphalt but I've once passed a site with a tar cooker going on that's so extremely pungent I cannot imagine hot asphalt to be particularly appetizing if it is anywhere near that. On the other hand, I know a friend who worked such a machine and he couldn't complain. Also, he smoked cigarettes a lot so cancer was perhaps the least of his worries.
In France, there's a century old custom in the construction industry to cook a "gigot bitume" to celebrate completion of important milestones in the project.
It was an absurd number of layers, to protect the fish from the tar. I think at least 3-4 but it's possible he went all the way to 5-6 full airtight wraps. And they were careful when they got to that part of the truckload, for sure
Great demonstration that the process of cooking is rather general and encompasses more than most people associate with their concept of cooking.
Cooking is just applying heat to food. Stovetops, grills, and pans conduct that heat to food using metal; ovens conduct it using air; fryers use oil; sous vide uses water. Each provides increasingly precise temperature control. The dishwasher method uses both water and air and doesn’t have much precision of temperature control, but it turns out alright because food is pretty tolerant of imprecise temperatures in cooking.
I like to use the reverse sear method to cook my steak, and I have jokingly referred to it as pas sous vide (“not under vacuum”) because I’m imitating sous vide except using an oven to keep air at a certain temperature rather than using an immersion circulator to keep water at a certain temperature. But in principle you could say dishwasher salmon is pas sous vide as well.
My poor man's sous vide is filling a really big pot with water and heating it up to a specific temperature. There's so much volume it doesn't cool down significantly by the food during cooking time. I put my piece of meat in a regular plastic bag and sink it down keeping the ends above water held secure by the lid.
If you get thick well insulated clay(?) pots the granny method is to bring them up to temp, wrap them in towels, smother em with pillows for good measure, and leave the food to cook like that for X hours. :)
Yep, clay. It doesn't really matters (you can use anything) but clay pots have a thick walls and keeps the temp for long, so they are often used for that long after a wood and coal burning stoves became extinct in regular homes. All Eastern Europe has a tons of variations of different recipes for cooking meals in pots.
How much of cooking is just a chase for tastier food? Up in Eastern Europe everyone is hardcore convinced overcooked meat is healthy because no bacteria plus warm food good for stomach. Tons of people still wince at medium rare steak.
> Up in Eastern Europe everyone is hardcore convinced overcooked meat is healthy because no bacteria plus warm food good for stomach. Tons of people still wince at medium rare steak.
I probably fit into this group, because in my mind it's better to be safe than sorry. While most of the food you'd get in stores is going to have good quality control and should be safe, "most" is still not "all". I recall a story from a number of years back in the news, where a person had found worms in some sushi that they got, for example.
While that's an outlier, there are also many people that enjoy hunting and eating game meat, not cooking which fully would be just asking for trouble, because you could end up with trichinellosis, essentially with parasitic worms in your muscle tissue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichinella
Of course, the meat that comes from farms is quite different, but regardless, you only need to get unlucky once to have plenty unpleasant experiences, from food poisoning to worse. So for the foreseeable future, "overcooked" meat it is for me, others can enjoy their raw or rare meats and fish as they please.
Seeing how poorly my folks handle hygiene in kitchen, they are more likely to get infection by washing your chicken or straight up leaving uncovered leftovers for days...
If I offered you irradiated steak or tartare, would you eat it?
> If I offered you irradiated steak or tartare, would you eat it?
I'm not sure what radiation would practically do and whether eating something like that would be safe for me either way.
As for the steak, if I was sure that it was quality meat, I might opt for medium well due to social pressure, otherwise leaning more on the side of well done, which some might view as a social affront. As for tartare, I wouldn't eat it either way, the same way how I don't eat raw salmon or other raw meat like that - while there are people over here that do enjoy that sort of thing, it's a matter of taste or perhaps an acquired taste.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radura seems to have such a friendly icon, but would freak people up there too. Majority of people are still wary of microwaves, almost a century after it's invention...
As for raw food - can't acquire taste without trying! Raw salmon per se isn't impressive - so many people get it wrong and are not using the fatty salmon belly. I haven't tried tartare yet myself.
> Majority of people are still wary of microwaves, almost a century after it's invention...
I wouldn't be weary of microwaves per se, but rather their effectiveness in making food safer to eat.
Even if we think just about it heating the food up enough to be safe, I've found that it doesn't heat up evenly, especially in the center of a rotating microwave. I guess that's what you get with standing waves, but it makes me a bit concerned.
I did try looking up more information, but found nothing conclusive, sadly.
> In parts of Eastern Europe, the World Health Organization reports, some swine herds have trichinosis infection rates above 50%, with correspondingly large numbers of human infections.[41]
That may not be totally unfounded. More developed countries have tighter livestock regulations. Not saying Eastern European farms or kitchens are "dirty", but there is just less oversight which leads to more opportunities in the swiss-cheese model of disease prevention.
Because in eastern Europe it's probably more dangerous to eat rare meat due to more lax regulations.
There's a reason restaurants add an asterisk after meat dishes. There's risk involved in consuming rare foods. The risk is just very small in the US and Europe. Not so small in other countries.
Actually the regulations here are extremely strict, so much that the restaurants are complaining all the time (stricter than in many Western countries if what they say is true). And having eaten raw meat (tartar steak) many times didn't cause any health problems.
I don’t think this is true at all. I’ve been to dozens of countries all over the world and in each one you will find dirty kitchens as well as clean ones.
You should visit Eastern Europe some time. It’s not just a stereotype.
Born and living my whole life in Romania, I can tell you that this fear is pretty true. Many people, especially from the older generations, don't trust medium or under steaks.
I should say those that it's not so much a question of the cleanliness of the kitchen, but of the confidence in quality control of the meat. Parasites and tainted meat are a lot more common than in more wealthy countries.
Ok so meat controls are bad in Romania. Romania is in Eastern Europe, but so are Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. I would have no qualms at all eating rare meat in either of those countries.
I just think stereotyping “Eastern Europe” as some mid-20th century agrarian backwater is very counterproductive to good discussion.
I would suggest some of those countries are more properly part of Central Europe, and at least in Czechia and Hungary steak tartare is a pretty traditional dish.
It is! Still it’s part of Eastern Europe, by some definitions. See the Wikipedia page for Eastern Europe. All in all it’s a useless moniker these days for most purposes.
Kitchens is one, but there's supply issues. My experience is that quality often is indeed lower (so is the price). I'm sure it plays with safety too.
Also lot of people (rightfully) don't trust the supermarkets - my friends were shocked I just buy raw fish in supermarket - no need to find a personal fisherman!
>both water and air and doesn’t have much precision of temperature control, but it turns out alright because food is pretty tolerant of imprecise temperatures in cooking
Actually my default program in the dishwasher is 55C water temp. Which is brutally overcooked for farmed salmon IMO (I prefer it around late 30-s, early 40-s), but it is precise. you can use it as a poor man's sous vide in a pinch I guess.
I am failing to grasp the wordplay in pas sous vide, but the rest of your comment sounds very sensible so I think it might be because I don’t speak French. Isn’t almost everything in life pas sous vide? Legacy style lightbulbs excluded.
Yes, everything except incandescent bulbs and space stations are pas sous vide. That’s where I find the humour: sous vide is simply an imprecise term for referring to a particular cooking method, but as it has escaped professional kitchens and made its way to home cooks, it has acquired a kind of respect as an arcane art that it arguably doesn’t deserve (and definitely doesn’t get in professional kitchens). I like pas sous vide because it’s an even more imprecise term. (It’s not a very funny joke, honestly.)
Sous vide translates literally to “under vacuum” as it involves cooking food in plastic bags that are vacuum sealed and cooked in water baths at precise temperatures. The technique, however, is much more useful for the temperature control elements than the vacuum. The reverse sear method mimics the temperature control element of the technique, but is just done in an oven, so it’s very much not under a vacuum.
> The technique, however, is much more useful for the temperature control elements than the vacuum
The vacuum sealing (which doesn’t actually leave a vacuum, because its not done in a rigid container, so name aside, sous vide cooking is not, in any substantive sense, cooking under vacuum) is a technique in achieving temperature control, because it means the food is in direct contact with the bag which is in direct contact with the water bath, rather than there being air in the bag insulating the food from the water bath.
> The reverse sear method mimics the temperature control element of the technique, but is just done in an oven, so it’s very much not under a vacuum.
In an oven, the food is in direct contact with the thermal medium without a layer in between, but the thermal medium is air rather than water; air has a similar specific heat but much lower density than liquid water at constant pressure, so even if your heat control is as good as in a sous vide system (with most ovens, it is not) you still aren’t really getting the same effect. Reverse sear is a faster, hotter, less even method than sous vide, with the advantage (for steaks, and things where this is an advantage) of producing greater surface evaporation which provides a better sear.
We used to bake potatoes in piles of grass from when my dad mowed the lawn. wrap your potato in tinfoil twice and bury it at the bottom of a large grass pile in the morning and come back at the end of the day. the grass gets so hot as it starts to breakdown. this is I think due to fermentation inside the grass mound and the insulation of the outer layers.
It might have been a day or so after the grass had been cut rather than that day.
I don't know how safe or clean it was, or how long it actually took to cook, or whether or not you _should_ do this, but we did, and it worked at least a few times
Even if it doesn't explode, it molds if you pile it up before it's good and dry. That's the whole fun of baling hay. You've got to try to predict a two or three day window (or more depending on temp and humidity) where you don't think it's going to rain. Cut one day, turn the next day or so, maybe turn again, then bale and stack when it's as dry as possible or in a panicked rush when the weather begins to roll in. At that point any bales with greasy spots usually get thrown to the side to get fed out first before they mold.
I'm curious what circumstances besides desperation not to lose your cutting would lead you to put it up with high enough moisture content that there's risk of explosion.
I'm curious what circumstances besides desperation not to lose your cutting would lead you to put it up with high enough moisture content that there's risk of explosion.
As a little girl, my grandmother got blown up is a barn explosion, around 1900. She's was fine, but passed on a couple of decades back, so I can't ask why they did it.
Just that every once in a while, she'd make sure I knew "don't do that!"
Oof. Glad she was alright. Both for her sake and your existence. There's so much danger on farms beyond the obvious machinery hazards. Grain silos terrify me. I've never dealt with them myself but have seen the aftermath of explosions and heard the horror stories of corn turning into quicksand underneath folks who climb in to get the auger clear.
On "Clarksons Farm" series, as he documents learning how to farm - there is a whole episode of him dealing with this, and missing the rain-window and losing crops and stuff... with them constantly testing moisture content in the grains. Cool stuff.
Most people fantasize about leaving tech and starting a farm.
I know two tech exec 'power-couples' who did just that - its WAY harder and more expensive that you can imagine.
I believe the cause is still undetermined but one theory is equipment malfunction in the manure management system causing the methane to get explosive.
Originating in the United States, Vincent Price demonstrated preparation of fish in 1975 when appearing at The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Price presented the dish as "a dish any fool can prepare".
Apropos of nothing, Vincent Price only played bad guys because he was such a nice guy that playing nice guys wasn't acting in his mind.
Edit: Wikipedia describes him as an American actor, art historian, art collector, and gourmet cook.
I'm vaguely familiar with Price's roles but the only works I've actually seen of his are "Thriller" (spoken-word only) and "Edward Scissorhands" (his final role). In the latter his character seems fairly benign if not good. But for sure the stuff in "Thriller" is designed to be spine-tingling.
Originating in the United States, Vincent Price demonstrated preparation of fish in 1975 when appearing at The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Price presented the dish as "a dish any fool can prepare".
Here's a clip[0] of that Tonight Show episode, from Nov. 21, 1975. The fish in this case was trout, not salmon, but it -- and some zucchini, etc. -- were cooked in a dishwasher.
(The link below is cued up to just before they walk over to the cooking area, but the earlier part might be of interest too, as they talk about art-forgery, etc.).
FWIW, the guest from the segment prior to Price's said it was the best fish she'd ever tasted.
I played around with the idea with my first Jeep Wrangler, a burly car with a perfectly exposed engine block. Never cooked anything, but I was endlessly entertained by the idea that I might. I suppose the transition to EVs will steal this particular daydream from my kids…
Upside is many EVs have 120v AC outlets so a portable induction plate is an easy add. It's actually an option for the Rivian truck in the pull out kitchen.
Unfortunately, "Rivian has deleted the Camp Kitchen, Tunnel Shuttle, and R1T Tent from its online gear shop. All three were previously listed as “not available yet” until earlier today when their entries disappeared."
That sucks. I wonder if it has anything to do with their ruggedness over time, which may result in recalls down the line if they vibrate whatever mounting components they have and become dangerous/unstable/easily-broken thus a maintenance nightmare.
What happens to the rear end kitchen in the event of a rear-end
plus with the through-tunnel - I wonder how easily the machine is completely totaled in the event of a crash causing the tunnel structures to warp/bend/buckle.
I love these trucks - but I hope they took them out for eaither engineering/safety or more simply suppliers/supply-chain issues.
You know, I forget about this article and stumble across it again every few years. It's always a delight to re-read.
I don't know why, but it always brings me back to the memory of my first Mission burrito, years ago — learning the secret menu words [1]; unwrapping our delicious meals as we talked [2]; talking about this startup or that startup, and what we were all going to build... those were simpler times, and we were still young and full of dreams.
[1] Slide up to the counter when it's a little less busy, ask for your burrito dorado, and prepare to have your mind blown.
[2] I remember ours was one of just a few tables that evening. The night was winding down, everyone huddled over their burritos, and the cool breeze drifted through the open storefront. It was like our own SF version of Edward Hopper's Nighthawks. Of course, this was way back in the day when the taquerias sometimes wouldn't have a line at all, if you knew the right time to drop in and order.
I can get a new pop up toaster for $10. If you used it for a single meal for four people and threw it away, it would add $2.50pp to the cost of the fish, which these days would be around $15pp (in my local currency).
He was the sort of guy who didn't really grasp economics, or hygiene. We lived in a country where you could get fish and chips cooked for you for about $5.
Side note - in a different video she also did debunking on other food hacks and ended up investigating Russian bot networks who uploads both food hacks for hits and then slips in propaganda.
It's one of the best and strangest and best Youtube channels, it has the appearance of a fun cooking channel, and often, 90% of the time, is exactly that, but then occasionally slips into some fascinating areas like, for example, global coco production lines and exploitation.
Off the top of my head over the years she has also uncovered some very strange child exploitation videos where the audio is different to the content. She has also almost definitely saved a huge amount of lives with her fractal wood burning debunking videos [2].
It's a little off topic but I thought you all here would find it interesting that a Youtube channel called How To Cook That with cookies and cakes as it's logo has done all of the above [3].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSwzau2_KF8
[2] https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/09/23/1059920/youtube-...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Cook_That