Raw pork and raw chicken touching each other
I bought a huge bag of pork bones, pork spare ribs and chicken bones. To save time and space I combined them all and separated them into 4 bags and chucked them in the freezer. Now i'm not so sure about having the raw pork and raw chicken touching each other in the bags and when I defrost them in the fridge, they would be touching each other for another 10 hours in a less-than-freezing temperature.
Is this safe?
(I am planning to use each bag at a time for making bone broth- boiled for up to 4 hours)
Best Answer
Yes, that's fine. You're going to cook everything to a much higher temp than the minimum safe temperature for the meat that requires the highest temperature. That's the key, and your plans are far beyond what is minimally required for safety.
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Can you mix raw chicken and raw pork together?
Yes, that's fine. You're going to cook everything to a much higher temp than the minimum safe temperature for the meat that requires the highest temperature.Is it safe to store raw chicken and pork together?
If these items cannot be stored separately, store them below prepared or ready-to-eat food. Raw meat, poultry and fish should be stored in the following top-to-bottom order in the refrigerator: whole fish, whole cuts of beef and pork, ground meats and fish, and whole and ground poultry.Can you cross contaminate pork and chicken?
Washing Meat and Poultry However, washing raw poultry, beef, pork, lamb or veal before cooking it is not recommended. Bacteria in raw meat and poultry juices can be spread to other foods, utensils and surfaces. We call this cross-contamination.Can pork cross-contamination?
Stochastic simulation found a high risk of cross-contamination from raw to cooked pork when the same hands, knives and cutting boards were used for handling raw and cooked pork (78%); when the same cutting board but a different knife was used, cross-contamination was still high (67%).Raw Chicken Handling
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Answer 2
If you hold to your plan to defrost these products in your refrigerator, be sure to place them toward the back of the refrigerator where temperatures are generally cooler, especially if the refrigerator door is opened frequently throughout the day.
As can be seen here, according to the FDA pork products (classed under fresh meat) should not be stored in the refrigerator for longer than five days, while chicken products (classed under fresh poulty) should not be stored longer than two days. (By refrigeration they mean an eight degree temperature range, greater than 32°F and less than 41°F.) Since chicken, in your case, is the limiting factor, you should plan to not exceed the recommended two day limit.
Here, also from the FDA, we find a strong recommendation toward use of a refrigerator thermometer. They also provide some excellent tips on the dos and don'ts of thawing, which includes the following important remark.
Because bacteria can multiply so rapidly in unrefrigerated food, it's simply unsafe to let food thaw at room temperature. If left unrefrigerated, some organisms can create toxins that will survive the cooking process even if the food is cooked to temperatures that kill the bacteria themselves.
Be sure however to extrapolate from this that the same principle applies to overly refrigerated food that applies to unrefrigerated food. (Otherwise the stated limits would have no grounding or value, i.e. 5 days for pork or 2 days for chicken.)
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