ScoopKona
Recycles dryer sheets
Every food safety website in the US will conform to the "70-125f" super danger zone guidelines. And they will insist that the only way to be safe is to hold food for X minutes at X temperature (usually 165f)
The problem is that there are other ways to kill enough food borne microbes that aren't chapter-and-verse the food safety guidelines.
For instance, if we hold a food at an internal temperature of 145f for 30 minutes, it is every bit as effective as holding food for 15 seconds at 165f or 1/100th of a second at 212f.
The difference being that some foods can take high temperatures and others are utterly ruined by them. For instance, poultry white meat begins to dry out at 145f. Fact of life. Cooking it to 165f *will* yield an inferior product, no matter what the cook does. (Dark meat can take the heat, and turns into a lovely confit when held at 165f.)
This is why most Thanksgiving dinners in the US are, well, failures. It's not the fault of the cook -- nobody is giving them the information they need to cook the turkey without ruining it. Either they get a turkey breast which tastes like sawdust; or greasy, unsafe dark meat.
The only way to thread this needle is to cook the dark and white meat separately at different temperatures -- confit the dark and be gentle with the white.
It is the same with canning and holding hot food. A health inspector will shut a restaurant down for holding food at 145f. But done correctly, it is quite safe. The problem is finding a crew which understands pasteurization times and temperatures. One person screws up and a lot of people are spending the weekend in the bathroom.
So they go with one time, one temperature, and expect everyone to conform. The really great restaurants cheat these rules like crazy and just hope not to get caught doing it.
