Hi, I’m Jennifer McEntire with the Institute of Food Technologist. And we’re talking about food safety. We’ve washed our hands, we’ve thawed our food properly and what we’re doing now is the best part, cooking. What we’ve got here is a hamburger that we’re cooking. It’s very important that you check the internal temperature of the hamburger before you eat it. You want it to be 165 degrees. The reason that a hamburger is considered more risky than a steak which can be cooked to a little bit lower temperature depending on your preference is because any contamination that’s present on the outside of the meat tissue gets ground up in the hamburger. So you can have things like E. Coli 0157 on the inside of the hamburger.
There are several ways that you can check the temperature of the hamburger. There are some devices like these, they’re really more suited for chicken and turkeys, things that are in the oven because you can stick them in the row of product when you put it in the oven and there’s this little cord, the probe goes in, the chicken like the one that we thought before. And this device will continue to tell you what the internal temperature is as detected by the probe. This one cost about $20.00. It’s really not the best. I think its a bit of over killed for a hamburger.
If you have these flashy little strips you can use them and you can just stick them in the center of the meat and check if it’s done. If the tip turns black it means that it’s done. We’ll do that in just a minute.
There are also digital thermometers. These are about $12.00, $13.00 and what you do is again, stick it in the meat on the thickest part and see what the temperature is. You’re looking for 165 degrees. There are also regular traditional thermometers that have a dial. This one has some of the suggested temperatures written on it. The temperature for poultry has changed recently, so meat thermometers that have temperatures written on them, the temperature for poultry is probably a little bit higher than actually needs to be.
The reason that you can’t just used site, see if it’s pink in the middle, the reason that’s not a good measure is because about a quarter of hamburgers will turn brown in the center before they’ve reached a 165 degrees, that critical temperature. On the other hand, if you buy a leaner cut of meat, the 90%, 93% of ground beef they may stay pink in the center. They maybe nice and juicy and thoroughly cooked even thought they are pink. So you don’t want to overcook your burger. So the best way to tell if it’s ready to it is to use a meat thermometer.
Let’s check this one now. It looks pretty good on the outside. What we’re going to do is take a clean utensil and stick this into the center of the burger. And the temperature is rising and we’ve so far ahead about 170 degrees that means that this burger is ready. We can double check just to illustrate how to use some of the other temperature thermometers. We’ll put this one in, the digital thermometer. And it looks like we have no problem yet reaching over 165 degrees. This one is a well done hamburger. Be careful of course, when you’re doing this that you don’t burn yourself.
And to check with this little strip, this will make and stick right in the center for the others who do need a couple of inches of penetration so that it gets a good and accurate reading. So we’ll stick this straight down right in the middle for about five seconds, and indeed it's flat that means this burger is ready to go.
What we’re going to do is put it on a brand new plate, so that we don’t’ cross contaminate, we don’t want to use the same plate that we took the burger off of and now we’re ready to eat this burger.
The next step is going to be storing leftovers. If we make too many burger what should we do with them?
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