Meat – How safe is steak tartare

As with all raw-meat or sushi dishes, this will never be 100% safe to eat; at best we are talking about a calculated food safety risk, with steps taken to mitigate that risk when possible. For this reason, it is CRUCIAL that the chicken be kept at fridge temperature as much as possible. When cutting, use a pre-chilled cutting board if possible, and serve immediately. For extra safety, blanch the chicken to kill surface pathogens, and slice off the cooked exterior.

Given the slimy, gelatinous texture of raw chicken, I believe the best results would come from finely dicing the chicken (small cubes) or very thinly slicing it. These approaches seem to work well for sushi and tuna tartare, which have similar textures. As with sushi, you need a shaving-sharp knife to get clean cuts.

For flavorings, your goals are twofold: add flavor and kill pathogens. An acidic sauce or marinade is obligatory, to reduce the pH below 4 and render it hostile to pathogens. The acidity should also reduce the slight sulfurous notes in raw chicken, by reacting with the sulfur in the molecules and making them less volatile. Taken to an extreme, this could produce a result much like ceviche, where the acid denatures the proteins and produces a texture akin to cooking. Fresh cut, finely-minced garlic is delicious and also hostile to pathogens. Many aromatic herbs also have antimicrobial properties, with fenugreek being a notable standout in this area.

There are a couple ways you could develop this into a full dish from there:

• Do it up like a ceviche: fresh lemon/lime juice, garlic, chili flakes, onions, salt, and maybe a little cilantro or coriander.
• Go European: white wine vinegar, thyme, rosemary, parsley flakes, garlic, black pepper, salt, and maybe a little olive oil
• Go sushi! Marinate it in rice wine vinegar, soy sauce, and spices, and serve it in sushi rolls, accompanied with a LOT of wasabi and pickled ginger. Those condiments help mitigate the food safety risk with their antimicrobial/antiparasite properties.
• Go sushi part 2: marinate it as above, but serve alone with a horseradish-based sauce containing lemon. EDIT: Apparently there is a real recipe along these lines. Toriwasa, or chicken sashimi. I found several recipes using wasabi (horseradish), soy sauce, parsley, and sake. The chicken's exterior is cooked, but the interior remains raw.

I should add a couple caveats to this: I have serious doubts about raw chicken as an ingredient, even with the best cooking possible. At best I think it will be edible but not delicious. The problem is that raw chicken is incredibly bland, and where it isn't bland, it has an unpleasant, slightly sulfurous flavor. The texture is somewhat off-putting too. I might be wrong, of course, but I think this is better handled as a theoretical exercise and not an actual dish. If you try any of these ideas and get food poisoning, it's your own dang fault for eating raw chicken... you boob.

I'd suggest Consumer Reports as a starting point. They specifically investigated the food safety of chicken in 2010 and found that (among other things):

• Campylobacter was in 62 percent of the chickens, salmonella was in 14 percent, and both bacteria were in 9 percent. Only 34 percent of the birds were clear of both pathogens. That's double the percentage of clean birds we found in our 2007 report but far less than the 51 percent in our 2003 report.

• Store-brand organic chickens had no salmonella at all, showing that it's possible for chicken to arrive in stores without that bacterium riding along. But as our tests showed, banishing one bug doesn't mean banishing both: 57 percent of those birds harbored campylobacter.

• Among all brands and types of broilers tested, 68 percent of the salmonella and 60 percent of the campylobacter organisms we analyzed showed resistance to one or more antibiotics.

The same issue seems to come up over and over again in food safety questions, and I really can't stress this enough: Salmonella is not the only dangerous bacteria in food. Campylobacter is just one of many others and produces heat-resistant enterotoxins that simply put, can make you very, very sick. Perfringens is also common, and raw chicken has also been found to harbour Listeria.

I've seen a number of articles and blogs claiming that people "worry too much" and most of them cite Ippuku in SF, which generated quite a stir by serving chicken tartare. It's legal in many countries for a restaurant to serve raw or undercooked food, provided that there is informed consent (the customer is specifically informed or specifically orders that their food be undercooked). However, legal is a very long way from safe, especially when we're talking about raw meat.

Steak tartare is more acceptable because, for some reason, Campylobacter don't like it and the incidence of E.coli is extremely low at only 0.26%. Raw beef isn't totally safe but most healthy people who eat it will not have complications afterward.

So, to summarize:

• Raw chicken: ~20% salmonella (depending on source), ~60% campylobacter (any source)
• Raw beef: Less than 0.1% e.coli, ~2% campylobacter (any source)

Conclusion: If you eat raw beef (steak tartare), you're a risk-taker. If you eat raw chicken, you have a death wish. Just say no.

At an absolute minimum, please don't serve this to your dinner guests with assurances that it will be safe. What you do to your own body is your decision to make, but it would be grossly irresponsible to serve anything made with raw chicken to anyone who hasn't been made fully aware of the risks.

P.S. Some of this data may be U.S. specific, but the problem is worldwide. For example:

• A New Zealand study showed a 36.7% contamination rate for salmonella and 84.3% for campylobacter, (thanks TFD!).
• A Canadian study showed a 37.5% incidence rate for salmonella and 75% for campylobacter.

So don't expect to be safer simply because you don't live in the U.S. If you're planning on doing this, you should check what your country's regulations and current statistics are regarding salmonella, campylobacter, C. perfringens, and listeria, for farms and plants producing chicken meat. That is your actual risk.

Buying "organic" might help, or might not, since organic is currently not a true legal or regulatory category in most regions.