Chicken meat handling

Chicken is a very common food that everyone loves. Almost everyday we will consumed chicken at restaurants, cafe, canteen, buffet, catering etc.  There are many ways of chicken cooking.  No matter what type of cooking, we ought to prepare the food correctly from the purchasing until on the table.

Do select good quality chicken meat.  Make sure the chicken is fresh, solid and in good textile, no slime, no swollen or greenish colour seen, no odour smell and with shinny skin.  A poor quality of chicken meat will contains more bacteria load and toxic excreted by bacteria.  If raw food is spoiled, no matter how complete the handling of the following handling, the food is still unsafe to be consumed.

In chicken cleaning, cut the chicken into the sizes that ease to cook. If chicken pieces are too thick, it might be difficult to be cooked (until all pieces thoroughly cooked).. Wash and clean the chicken with clean water.  Make sure the container and equipment that we used is clean.

When storing chicken meat, chicken that is cleaned should be cooked directly as the meat is  easily spoil and sting. Make sure the chicken is stored in freezer.  When there is power failure and the stored chicken is started to soften, do cook the chicken immediately.

Frozen chicken should be defrosted properly before cooking, especially chicken which is thick.  After taking out chicken from freezer, do the defrost using the following 3 method (either one) -

1. Soak the chicken into the clean container under water tab with running water.

2. Put the chicken into the microwave, select "defrost" to do defrost.

3. Put the food in the chiller of refrigerator

After defrost, we could go through cooking process.  Make sure to cook the chicken thoroughly until there is no blood on the bone or meat.  Re-cook if there is still blood on the chicken.  When stewing the food, make sure the stewed water is clear and not in pink colour.  Every uncooked portion still contains bacteria which causes food poisoning.  

These are the concerns while handling the chicken. In fact, other high risk food should be handled the similar way so that to consume the food in safe.   

Credit: Food Safety and Quality Division, Ministry of Health