I was cooking a roast and one hour into cooking I tasted the broth and didn't like the flavor so I rinsed the roast really well and noticed that the crock had cracked – it hadn't been cracked when I started. So my question – is the roast still safe to eat if I finish it in the oven or should I throw out the roast because of the crack?
Crockpot is cracked
food-safety
Related Solutions
Please don't bother.
Meat spending any significant amount of time in the danger zone of 40 F - 140 F (4.4 C - 60 C) that has not been fully cooked should never be re-chilled to be served later. Given that Salmonella can be found throughout poultry, not just on the surface, and that it's almost guaranteed that your poultry had some level of a pathogen present, you shouldn't risk it.
Your not so thorough cooking, likely to an internal temperature of 120 F - 130 F, has basically heat-shocked the bacteria present imbuing them with a much higher than usual heat resistance. On top of that it likely took at least a few hours to get the meat back below 40 F (at which they can still grow, albeit slowly), so depending on the initial amount of infection and the time spent in the danger zone you likely have a bacteria population minimally in the hundreds of millions, possibly in the billions.
In this answer of mine I give a lot of detail regarding the relation between temperature and duration and it's effect on Salmonella. The important take-away is that with any reasonable temperature death is not instant, it's merely a percentage of the population that is killed at any given temperature and duration. As few as 100,000 Salmonella cells can get you sick, and it takes much fewer for E. Coli. So even if you're killing five-9's worth of bacteria, is it really worth it?
I'm all for eating rare meat (not poultry), but only if I'm confident in the quality and handling of said meat before it reaches my plate. Think of it this way, if the meat were exposed to these conditions before it reached your plate it would be considered gross negligence, and would likely result in a recall.
The guidelines that many agencies publish to safely cook meat all assume typical levels of contamination, given proper handling (though they do err greatly on the side of safety). They simply aren't accurate when you are starting with meat that has a population large enough to sicken or kill a small village.
I'm not even going to begin to address the toxic waste products produced by some pathogens, which are not destroyed by heat.
Throw it out and prevent this in the future by being sure to cook it all the way through. It sounds like you likely just grabbed the chicken out of the refrigerator and threw it directly on the heat, this can lead to the exterior cooking too quickly before the interior has time to cook. Get in the habit of setting your meats out for 30m to an hour so that it reaches room temperature throughout, but cook it immediately, do not re-chill it.
It sounds like you have emulsified the fat from the meat into the broth. This will happen if you don't skim the fat and then cook at a rolling boil. The oil droplets will become very fine and disperse light, which is what causes the broth to appear white. If that is in fact the cause of the whiteness, it isn't a safety risk.
Best Answer
If you rinsed the roast in the crock, chances are good your crock pot cracked because of the temperature shock from the water you rinsed it in.
If the roast hasn't sat at room temperature for more than an hour or so you should be OK to put it in the oven and let it cook the rest of the way. If you have a meat thermometer, you should make sure the internal temperature of the meat reaches about 160°F before eating it. A lower temperature might still be safe however since 160° is the minimum recommended temperature for ground meat, which has more bacteria inside than solid meat. It doesn't hurt to be careful though.