The Safety Rules To Remember When Par-Cooking Chicken

Cooking takes time, and all of us are searching for ways to cut down on just how much time we spend preparing dinner. Par-cooking is the culinary term for partially cooking ingredients ahead of time so that whatever meal you're preparing comes together quicker when you fully prepare the meal the day of. Casseroles are a prime candidate for par-cooking as it cuts down significantly on prep work, but before you start par-cooking for your classic chicken casserole you ought to know the food safety tips surrounding par-cooked chicken.

The short and easy answer here is that chicken should never be par-cooked unless you plan on immediately transferring the partially cooked chicken to another heat source where it will be fully cooked, per the official USDA guidance. Even if you partially cook the chicken and then stick it in the fridge or freezer, you still haven't killed the bacteria inside the raw chicken and, thus, have opened yourself up to the very real possibility of food poisoning.

Raw chicken can contain Salmonella, Campylobacter, or Clostridium perfringens, all of which are capable of making you sick. Contaminated poultry affects roughly 1 million people in the United States every year, and par-cooking your chicken is a great way to join the ranks. But nobody actually wants to get food poisoning, so simply avoid par-cooking chicken as a way to prepare your dinner ahead of time to mitigate the risk.

Keep in mind that you can still fully cook chicken ahead of time as a way to cut down on prep time. The problem is that undercooked chicken is unsafe to eat, and partially cooking raw chicken does nothing to alleviate the problem since the bacteria will have survived the cooking process. That's why it's so important for people to check the internal temperature of the meat so that you can be certain the bacteria inside has in fact been killed.

Chicken needs to reach an internal temperature of 165 degrees Fahrenheit for it to be considered fully cooked and safe for consumption. Anything less than 165 degrees Fahrenheit should be considered par-cooked and thus capable of causing illness. If you do find yourself in a situation where you have partially cooked chicken, you'll need to cook it to the full 165 degrees if you want to be certain that it's safe to eat.

Although it may seem like par-cooking meat is a great life hack, it's better to par-cook ingredients that don't have the same capacity to cause illness when improperly cooked, such as vegetables or rice. There are simply too many health risks involved with partially cooked meat, and you run the additional risk of unintentionally allowing the uncooked interior of the chicken to spoil while the relatively cooked exterior appears fine.