Have you had any trouble with food poisoning from dressing cooked at home in a turkey?

Question

Despite what the experts say, I have never been as impressed with stuffing/dressing cooked outside the bird as in it. I would like to return to it, but all the warnings that I have heard make me leery. On the one hand, my family ate stuffing from a roasted turkey for about thirty years with no problem at all. Then all these dire warnings started appearing. My question is, have you personally ever experienced the food poisoning from turkey dressing which is allegedly so dangerous?

Answer

Nope, but a co-worker's entire family (in-laws too) was knocked out for a weekend (and some longer) by her sister in law's Thanksgiving meal. So it's not an unfounded concern.

Answer

I bloody love a conversation about statistical relevance.... but maybe we'll save that for another day!!

gfr1111 - the only word of caution is to make sure everything is cooked properly. The main issue about the warnings is as the bird is stuffed, the heat cannot circulate and therefore the inside of the bird may be undercooked, poisoning everyone.

You could always stuff a rolled breast of turkey covered in bacon, which means you get a little less stuffing, but also far reduce the food poisoning risk

Answer

I come from a southern "dressing" family, with it cooked outside the turkey with lots of homemade stock and maybe some butter, but I wonder if it's possible to get the best of both worlds by browning a few turkey wings/necks a bit, and then placing them on top of the dressing in a casserole as it cooks, to get the drippings in directly? Never tried it myself. 

as others have noted, there are multiple places were the food poisoning can develop.

http://www.epicurious.com/archive/blogs/editor/2010/11/to-stuff-or-not-to-stuff-a-thanksgiving-turkey-dilemma.html

Answer

I had fabulous luck roasting the turkey ON the bed of stuffing.

Parted out the bird. Built a mound of my favorite stuffing in the roasting pan. 

Put the breast and full legs on top of the mound of stuffing.

Roasted as normal. Pulled the breast when it reached temp. Pulled the legs when they reached temp.

All the juices had filtered down through the stuffing and imbued exactly the flavor one would get from filling the bird.

To my palate, I got the additional benefit of some of the stuffing being crispy and the balance being juicy.

Answer

Other reasonable guidelines seem be 

- Do not stuff the turkey ahead of time, even though it's tempting - that's probably the easiest route to problems

- stuff _loosely,_ so that dressing heats up more quickly

- check the temperature in the middle of the stuffing before considering it done. My old Joy of Cooking says you want it at 165, and Google hits seem to agree: "Check the internal temperature of the stuffing. Insert the thermometer through the cavity into the thickest part of the stuffing and leave it for 5 minutes. The stuffing must reach 165°F or higher, if it is not, return it to the oven and continue cooking...." Or perhaps more practically, "If thermometer does not read 165°F, transfer stuffing to microwave-safe baking dish and microwave on high until 165°F, about 3 minutes for 10 degrees."

For me - not sure I would want to stuff and cook a whole stuffed turkey these days - if only because Salmonella prevalence seems to have increased over the years. But in any case I am unlikely to want to deal with a whole bird, and turkey parts on top of stuffing really are fine.

Answer

It happens. Whether it's from the bird, or the stuffing, or something else, I've known of a couple of occasions where entire gatherings were fighting for the loo afterwards. 

Full-blown food poisoning, doubtful. Tricky stomach set off by some little nasties in the food? Most likely. 

Somewhere (ATK, maybe), I watched a technique where they spatchcocked a bird and had that laid across a pile of stuffing. That way, the bird cooked evenly, and the stuffing cooked long enough and got the benefit of the drippings.

Answer

I haven't but then our family always found it a pain to unstuff the bird so dressing was cooked in a different pan.
I like the idea of putting the stuffing below the bird.

Answer

I've heard that most incidents of salmonella poisoning are due to cross contamination, i.e, a contaminated cutting board or knife, rather than undercooked stuffing or turkey.

Answer

I've always make a mushroom and onion stuffing using Pepperidge Farm Herb stuffing (the blue bag), and I've been underwhelmed by the quantities of goodies called for in the recipe on the back of the bag. I was more generous even when cooking the stuffing inside the turkey. When I switched from inside to outside the bird, I compensated for the missing poultry drippings by doing the following. 

o Making my own chicken stock -- lots of it -- in advance. I wasn't content to stop there. After finishing the stock, I took it, added white wine -- perhaps a cup to 1 quart of chicken stock, added a few onions, carrots, celery, and parsley and simmered the mixture until I had about 3 cups liquid total. (This can be scaled as needed.)

o Caramelizing onions, about 1 medium/medium-small onion per person. I used clarified butter when caramelizing.

o I'd always used crimini mushrooms instead of white button mushrooms, and lots of them. I'd slice my mushrooms and cook them using the notion of making duxelles. (By that I mean that I'd saute the mushrooms until they gave off a most of their moisture and what remained were slices of concentrated mushroom flavor.) Ditto for using clarified butter when cooking the mushrooms.

When I mixed the stuffing, I generally used more liquid than the recipe calls for. Outside the bird, I'm making much more stuffing than the amount the cavity of a bird can hold. This calls for a long bake time so I start by using lots of stock and I add more as the cooking proceeds.

The basic notions of quality ingredients and generous amounts of added goodies can be applied to anyone's favorite recipe with good results. I can't remember a skeptical guest still feeling deprived after eating my outside-the-turkey stuffing.

Answer

I don't think it's the stuffing that's the issue particularly but rather the turkey itself if undercooked. Our family has pretty much always opted to cook our giblet/sausage stuffing inside the turkey and neither that nor the bird itself would taste the same without the other. The only exceptions have been some other occasions on which I may have smoked a turkey or done one on a spit on the grill that I would have prepared some other kind of dressing. (I'm a little reluctant to admit remembering some sixty or so years ago always helping my French father make the stuffing using the grinder on his big Hobart mixer. We'd grind the onions and celery and dried bread, then the well cooked giblets, and finally the raw sausage meat -- to make sure that the stuffing would have plenty of flavor. Many people loved to eat at our house. We never heard any complaints.) 

But I wonder about real outcome data. That's hard to find too:

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/11/27/cdc-cautions-against-thanksgiving-dangers-but-data-on-prevalence-is-scarce

http://www.sw.org/poison-center/hazards-food

http://www.poison.org/articles/2013-apr/food-poisoning

This last article lists many of the causes of food poisoning -- it says that there are 250 in all. Among them are leafy greens, shellfish, nuts, and, of course, undercooked poultry. So you shouldn't assume that the turkey was to blame in all cases, especially if Aunt Millie made her special oyster dressing. But, in any case, make sure that the turkey is done, white meat, 170, dark meat 180, stuffing 165.

Answer

Please bear in mind that if anyone at your table has a compromised immune system they could be in grave danger from a case of food poisoning that would make a person with a healthy immune system be best friends with the toilet for a couple of days. I have an autoimmune disorder which means that I have to take medication that weakens my immune system. This is why people who play food safety roulette make me nervous.

Answer

Monch,

Putting the dressing/stuffing under the turkey sounds like a great idea, thanks. 

PeanutButterJelloTime, Thanks for the comment about the lack of circulation of heat in the stuffing problem. Since a cook is probing the dressing with just the tip of a stick-shaped thermometer, as you point out, there is no way to guarantee that all sections of the stuffing in the bird are up to temperature, short of cooking the living daylights out of the bird and ruining the bird itself.

Amandarama, I tried Alton Brown's microwaving the dressing before it goes into the bird. (I am a big fan of Alton Brown's and mourn the passing of "Good Eats.") Unfortunately, I microwaved the dressing excessively and it did not come out very well, once I eventually dug it out of the bird (post-microwaving). Maybe I should give it another try and and watch the microwaved dressing temperature like a hawk before putting it into the bird.

Ferret and TasteyRuben, you are the only ones who have actually encountered food poisoning problems, but, again, these were secondhand. You heard about someone else who had it, not you personally. It is not that I doubt that food poisoning from dressing does not happen, but it seems pretty remote and because these were stories which you had heard (rather than experienced personally), we cannot get any details about how the bird and stuffing were treated before the unfortunate incident occurred.

Thegforceny, yeah, it's all anecdotal "evidence," and that bothers me, but what else can we do? I guess I will try Monch's suggestion and Alton Brown's advice and see how flavorful the dressing comes out, using these safe remedies. I think that if it were just me, I'd risk it, but I am reluctant to put a whole Thanksgiving table full of people in danger, no matter how remote that danger might be.

My suspicion is that many of the people who have reported a food poisoning problem made the stuffing well beforehand, not immediately before stuffing it in the bird, and not immediately before roasting the bird. But who can tell? My other suspicion is that modern processing of the turkey, just like chicken, may distribute the bacteria as a by-product of having machines rip the guts out of a turkey, thereby distributing the contents of the turkey's digestive system into the turkey, although in microscopic quantities.

But that roasted-in-the-bird stuffing sure was good. I will miss it, unless one of the methods suggested by posters works. I will keep my fingers crossed and report further, although it may be a while, depending on how Thanksgiving dinner and Christmas dinner occur this year. Thanks to all. Please keep those posts coming.

Answer

My Mother used to stuff the turkey with no problems,but after all the hoopla about it , she stopped.Now,we fry the turkey so we don't think about stuffing it first!

Answer

Decades of doing it. Never had a problem.
Left over stuffing is baked in a dish dressing style.
The family chose to dine out on thanksgiving exactly two years in a row until revolt ensued due to tasteless and poor quality food found on thanksgiving day.. Now I would just downright decline a dining out option.

If done correctly and proficient, stuffing a turkey is life at its best.

Answer

Stuffing placed in a raw turkey will absorb bacteria from the cavity and be soaked in turkey juices. You don't need to be a scientist to understand the potential food poisoning risk there.

It's simple to ensure that it's safe to eat when cooked in the bird: use a thermometer to make sure it comes to 165 before you eat it.

Stuffing in the bird may not be up to 165 even though the turkey is done and is ready to be pulled. In that case, merely dig it out and place in a casserole dish and return to the oven to come to temp.

Answer

I think these cautionary tales of food poisoning from stuffed turkeys arose from people who put warm stuffing in the bird's cavity the night before then put the turkey back in the refrigerator. Bacteria and toxins grew before the bird was sufficiently cooled. Cooking kills the bacteria but not the toxins. It is perfectly safe to stuff a bird ahead of time as long as every component is below 40 degrees and then cooked ( I was going to say to 140 F. degrees but I just read this online "At 122°F there are no bacteria that are pathogenic (cause illness) to humans that survive." Like someone else said, most people get sick from cross contamination not from under cooked food. I stuff chickens in the morning for late afternoon roasting most every week and never had a problem.

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Have you had any trouble with food poisoning from dressing cooked at home in a turkey?

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