QLD
826 posts
I have noticed most people including my wife never wash the utensils whilst cooking.
As soon as it cooks ( anything really ) I wash the utensils and then after that I will have a taste test.
Where most people just munch away with raw food mixed with cooked food on the wooden mixing spoon.
Even on the cooking shows they all just lick away. Kinda find it repulsive. An ex used to love eating the raw mince while cooking a spag bog... Hence ex.
Is this something people think of?
How many people do this?
NSW
2568 posts
I think someone needs to eat some concrete.
Raw meat is great. Better bleeding and dripping off the chin and onto a salad with fine Asian herbs and spices.
QLD
826 posts
Define top quality mince please Cisco.
Raw egg yolk yeah, but not the white I thought.
622 posts
You need to temper your preference with a bit of knowledge and common sense.
Raw meat/fish....harmful bacteria..etc forms on the outside, and slowly permeates in. So a fresh cut of meat even from an months old aged carcass is fine, as long as the meat from the outside is not included.
Aged meat (you can only eat aged meat...you never want to eat fresh meat - it is way too tough and tasteless...it needs to be at least 3-4 weeks old before you sell it.) Good aged beef/lamb, much longer, pork and chicken a lesser time scale). Processes like salting the outside of the meat kills off the nasties, by taking out the water they need to survive, so you can have a fresh leg of pork that has been salted years ago, like prosciutto eaten "raw"
High heat, frying roasting etc kills almost any harmful nasties on the outside of the meat. You risk problems eating supermarket mince because you don't know if some aged nasty stuff is now in the middle of the mince, so you should cook this to well done.
As for the licked spoon risk...back into the boiling sauce, or near too - extremely unlikely.
A cold dish well some chance...about as much as living closely to the person. If it the person was very close to you and you actually kissed - so much more chance.
If you licked and kissed whole lot more stuff on the chef ............ a lot more chance! So live dangerously!
WA
3519 posts
My tip for tartar: never ever mince it in a mincer! Always knife mince the meat!
Specially at the butcher cause the first bit that will come out of the mincer could be from any cut!
For tartar use best cut, fillet rump etc. not mince must be lean.
In mine, I put capers, mustard, salt, pepper, garlic, onion, 1 yolk, diced pickles, little bit of Worcester sauce, little bit of ketchup, a dash of booze (whisky, wodka., brandy....). must rest it 1/2 hour in fridge, serve with crusty toasted bread buttered.
peeps our days are so worried about bad bugs they keep cleaning whatever they touch with stupid disinfectant lotion, same go with the kids. They are getting weak to bacterias and prone to infections as the immune system is not strong anymore!
WA
132 posts
There had to be a vegan pipe up sooner or later.
Sorry buddy but we need meat.
NSW
3487 posts
I have no strong views on the merit, or otherwise, of a meat or vegetable based diets, where I do have some issues is using the word "raw", simply because that's not where we're at in terms of our development as a species, it's probably not in our best interests to make what could be a retrograde step and eat a higher proportion of uncooked food, because for millennia, we have adapted to eat cooked.
I'm a subscriber to the belief that "cooking made us human" (copy and paste into google for the wiki) and although the general scientific is community has still to decide if this is a viable and testable hypothesis over multi science disciplines, there's good evidence to suggest that it's plausible.
The archaeological and anthropological evidence for it is weak.
The DNA evidence relating to certain developmental traits such as smaller jaws, large brains and less complex intestines is there in some, but not all cases.
To me, the most compelling evidence, thus far, has related to the studies done in relation what happens to our bodies when we try to eat something like a very tough tuber raw. Because cooking has pre digested the meal for us, our jaws no longer need to work as hard, our internal digestive tracts need not spend so much time extracting the required nutrients our gut flora can change to accommodate simpler foods with less potential for harmful microbes, our waste systems also benefit.
When looking that this phenomenon of cooking making us human, it's important not to make the mistake of thinking that our emergence, into what is believed to be the approximate time of us starting to become human, 1.8 million years ago, was because those 2 good homo erectus mates, thag and gronk, would gather the family on the patio of their cave and throw a few mega fauna on the BBQ, there's no evidence that comes close to believing that's the case.
What they can surmise is a scenario where Thag and Grong were gathering food in a recently burnt areas and found that the tubers they were finding close to the surface had changed in both texture and taste, and any carrion that did not survive the inferno, smelt better and were easier to eat.
Evidence of when we actually started to control fire, and hence cook, is continually being upgraded as new discoveries are made.
Our cousins, the Proto Neanderthals, appear to have been using it around 300K to 400K years ago, in 2013 a site in South Africa showed evidence that our direct ancestors were using it 1 million years ago, that's 200K older than was previous thought.
If we were to take the lesser figure of 800K years for our direct ancestor controlling fire, and use a generational cycle of 20 years, that would be 40000 generations of cooking from them to us, factor in possible rates of change by natural selection, sexual selection and mutations, then it's reasonable to make the assumption that cooking food turned out to be a good idea.
WA
313 posts
Nothing like a nice piece of rare chicken.
1595 posts
Only oysters raw, everything else medium well.
2132 posts
Taena saginata
Mmmmmm mmmm
VIC
1040 posts
Fresh caught raw scallops....yummy yummy yum
QLD
826 posts
Cheers Brezzers.
A few great reply's and a few odd ones.
Vegan's - I partially agrree as a few weeks a year I go on a meat free diet for a week, feels good - but get tired to quick and go back to meat. I like it and find it's my staple. Number 2's mmmmmmm yea lets not go there when meat free.
Fresh to me is 24hrs, kinda struggle with the "few months" vs fresh thing.
Tried the raw mince thing. yep number 2's got violent so screw that - even made sure with my butcher first.
I suppose it's what your used to. For me a small change at a time. lost 10kg over last 4 months from just cutting food back in general.
Hard to change food habbits. I'll stick to the 80's food style and not some Masterchef deconstructed raw devine whoo harrr dinner.