The Mistake Everyone Makes While Thawing Raw Chicken

Imagine the scene: You've bought all the wine you need, got your ingredients ready, and safely thawed your chicken in preparation for your big dinner party. All that's left to do now is cook it. What's the next step? Well, many people would simply take their chicken from the fridge and put it straight into the pan or oven, perhaps even believing it the safest way to do things and maybe the best way to avoid poultry potentially spoiling or causing food poisoning — the last thing you want to give to your guests.

However, this is actually a mistake, although one that almost everyone makes. It's especially tempting when you quickly need to cook for yourself and don't have the time (or patience) to waste, but taking your chicken straight from the fridge into the pan or oven, and thus not giving it time to properly warm up, is a mistake that can lead to unevenly and even undercooked meat. On top of that, leaving it out for too long can put the chicken into the so-called 'danger zone' and risk spoiling — so it's a fine line to balance.

Before cooking your chicken, you should always let it sit and warm up a little. This is particularly true if you're cooking the whole bird because whacking it straight into the oven from the fridge means it won't cook as well, but the principle remains true with smaller cuts too. Why is that? Well, not only can cooking it cold straight from the fridge cause the outer layer of skin to crack or burn, but it can also mean that the bird cooks unevenly, something that could give you the dreaded combination of burnt on the outside and raw (or cold, at the very least) on the inside, which is far from ideal.

So, how can you avoid this? When you're prepping your dinner and getting all your ingredients together, take the chicken out and put it on the counter for about 15 minutes. However, do not leave it for longer than that or you run the risk of letting bacteria develop (more on that risk below). The thinking behind this is a process known as tempering. You've most likely heard about tempering in relation to chocolate or mixing eggs into hot cream, but really it describes any situation in which you slowly change a food's temperature to keep it stable. In the case of raw chicken, tempering basically means that you give the meat time for the internal temperature to rise, which allows it to cook more evenly. If you don't let it warm up, different parts of the bird will go into the oven at different temperatures and finish cooking at different times.

However, be warned that tempering your chicken is a fine line. 15 minutes is the ideal amount of time, but if you leave it too long (ie. allowing the meat to sit at room temperature for too long) you run the risk of letting the meat spoil. According to the CDC, as many as 1 million Americans get sick from eating contaminated poultry — food poisoning, in other words, every single year. As you likely already know, consuming raw chicken, its juices, or chicken that has spoiled can develop all sorts of harmful bacteria that get you and your guests sick. 

This is mainly because leaving chicken out on the counter for too long can give disease-causing bacteria a chance to grow. Room temperature falls within what the USDA ominously calls the 'danger zone' or the temperature range between 40 and 140 degrees Fahrenheit which is ideal for bacteria growth. Ultimately, this hack is all about temperature and timing so thaw your chicken in the fridge but don't cook it cold; instead take it out and let it warm up for 15 minutes first, but no longer.