Chicken--Partially Cooked....Can I still use it?
Yesterday, I started to make chicken soup. I had the 3 cut up chickens in a vat of water and it had just started to boil. Then I got a call re a family emergency. I turned off the pot and removed just the chicken and stuck it in the fridge. I didn't come home until 7 hours later.
Should I just toss the chicken or is there no reason to continue to make chicken soup today? Thank you!
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I am not suggesting what to do either way, just letting you know that sticking a pot of boiling liquid in the fridge with partially cooked meat in it raises the temperature of the fridge and takes longer to cool down. Depending on how big the pot was, the meat probably sat in the danger zone for a couple of hours, unless you pulled the meat out and put it in a separate container.
›2 Replies -
jmcarthur8
Dec 24, 2011 07:41 AM
Sure, just cook it!
My son, who cooks in his apartment at college, sometimes gives me the whole chicken he has poached to make a light chicken broth for other recipes. He doesn't cook it for very long, I guess, because the chicken is always pink down inside. If he isn't coming home the next day, he freezes it, otherwise he just brings me a partially cooked chicken.
I throw it in the pot right away, and have soup. -
cowboyardee
Dec 24, 2011 05:38 AM
The chicken itself should be fine to make a soup from as long as your fridge isn't severely underpowered or over crowded. You just want to make sure that it went from hot to fridge-temp in a reasonable amount of time (under 4 hours if you're a stickler trying to be fully 100% safe, under 7 or 8 hours if you just want reasonable assurance that it's probably won't make anyone sick).
If you left the water from that first boil just sitting lukewarm on your stovetop for most of a day, I wouldn't suggest using it (the water). No huge loss. A lot of chicken stock recipes have you bring chicken to a boil and throw away that water anyway before refilling the stockpot and making the stock.
›2 Replies
