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Comment by Larrikin | Hacker News Reader

Cooking chicken to 170 F is a good way to to be safe and also ensure nobody enjoys your chicken. There are various temperatures depending on the cut that are safe.

If you can check your chicken to know that it is 170 then you have a thermometer to check it at other temperatures. If you have a sous vide machine you can go even lower, you just have to increase the time.

https://www.seriouseats.com/the-food-lab-complete-guide-to-s...

https://www.seriouseats.com/how-to-take-meat-temperature-the...

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> also ensure nobody enjoys your chicken

That's an overstatement. Plenty of dishes cooks chicken all the way to well-done and the result is still delicious.

For instance, chicken adobo let the chicken sit in a simmering pot for nearly an hour, and it's absolutely delicious.

There's a big difference between cooking dark meat and white meat. Thighs and drumsticks can easily go higher and still be good, or even better. But breasts lack the fat and connective tissue that breaks down in longer cooks, so they're a lot less forgiving.

Cooking thighs / legs to less than 185 generally results in poor texture.

I'm happy with chicken thighs below that, but I pulled a turkey out at 165F internal temp once and it felt disturbingly underdone. Some of it was still pink. Safe, but not very enjoyable.

I personally wouldn't feel safe eating pink turkey.

Heh yeah, it was weird. We were all fine, but it was weird. A good reminder that appearance is an unreliable indicator of safety, even if in this case the appearance was a false positive.

The articles you link refer to cooking in a sous vide which most people are not. So yes you could kill enough bacteria to be safe following that article if you kept it at 150 deg for 2.8 minutes but with standard cooking that is not easy to measure or maintain. That is why the guideline is 170 instant read because the pasteurization time at that temp is 0.

>if you kept it at 150 deg for 2.8 minutes but with standard cooking that is not easy to measure or maintain

It's actually surprisingly hard not to do that. Unless you're cooking at unusually low pan/oven temperatures, the internal temperature of a chicken breast taken off at 150° will probably hit 155° or higher over the next couple minutes.

(provided that parts of the meat closer to the cooking surface are > 155º when taken off)

I don't find it hard since I leave a thermometer inside the chicken breast while it's roasting.

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