Barbeque chicken—what could be better?

I’ve had a serious weakness for barbeque chicken since my childhood in rural Arkansas, where one of the key players on the social scene was the 4H Club, and one of the biggest social events of the year was the 4H Barbeque Chicken Cook-Off. I can see it now: grills spread far and wide across the local fairgrounds, the air filled with the most aromatic smoke imaginable, and everybody jealously guarding the “secret recipe” for their barbeque sauce.

If you’re a barbeque chicken aficionado, you probably already know the rules of safe chicken grilling, but just in case you can use a refresher, here’s a short—and—sweet version:

Put your raw chicken on one plate to carry it out to the grill, and on a separate, clean plate to carry it to the table after grilling. Don’t put the cooked chicken back on the raw chicken plate unless you’ve scrubbed that plate with hot, soapy water before using it again.

Use a digital meat thermometer. You need to cook your chicken to an internal temperature of at least 165 degrees Fahrenheit, and you may want to go even higher, depending on your personal preferences on chicken doneness.

If you touch the raw chicken, be sure to wash your hands in hot, soapy water for at least 20 seconds afterwards. The same goes for any utensils, such as tongs, that have touched the raw chicken.

As for the barbeque sauce, there are two schools of thought on that. You might want to cook the chicken in a skillet on the stove first, so that it’s almost done, and then put it on the grill for the finishing touches of smokey flavor and barbeque sauce (while aiming for that all-important internal temperature of 165 degrees). Or, if you’re more of a barbeque purist, cook the chicken “plain” on the grill, until it’s well on its way to being done, before you start slathering on the sauce. The reason? If you bath the bird in sauce as soon as it goes onto the grill, your sauce will turn black and look overdone long before the chicken’s actually cooked thoroughly, and you wind up taking the chicken off the fire too early.

Why all the worry about chicken cleanliness? Two words: campylobacter and salmonella.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, campylobacter is the most commonly identified bacterial cause of diarrheal disease in the world, and this bacteria lives in the intestines of healthy chickens. The CDC also notes on its website that “most raw poultry meat has campylobacter on it.”

As for salmonella, it too lives in the intestines of birds, and can cause an illness called salmonellosis that often includes diarrhea, fever and abdominal cramps.

In case you’re beginning to suspect that cleaning up chicken carcasses is a good idea, you’re absolutely right. And the scientists of the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) have the same idea.

Fortunately for all of us, they’ve also come up with a very promising answer: a cleansing solution that can be used on the eviscerated birds in the poultry processing plant.

The cleanser is made up of very low concentrations of lauric acid and potassium hydroxide. This could be extremely useful to poultry processors who want a practical, non-chlorine-based sanitizer, and it could also be a boon for processors in countries where chlorine rinses aren’t used.

In the ARS studies, the poultry carcasses were spray-washed with different concentrations of the lauric acid-potassium hydroxide combination. Results showed that a concentration of 2 percent lauric acid and 1 percent potassium hydroxide was effective at removing bacteria from the broiler carcass.

When the scientists tested various spray pressures, they found that the pressure didn’t have a significant effect on reducing bacterial contamination.

But they did find that increasing the duration of time of the spray—from five seconds to 15 or 30 seconds—did significantly reduce the bacterial contamination.

So the scientists at ARS are doing their bit to help bring us cleaner chicken—and we know how to do our bit to ensure safe summer cookouts. Happy grilling, everybody!

The Agricultural Research Service is the chief in‑house scientific research agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

You can read more about ARS discoveries at http://www.ars.usda.gov/news.