Abstract:

Salmonella, zoonotic bacteria normally present in broiler chicken flocks, are a major cause of food-borne ill-ness of known aetiology in Trinidad and Tobago, and in the wider English speaking Caribbean. Although cooking is re-garded as an acceptable method for thermal destruction of these pathogens, consumption of undercooked, and re-contaminated cooked broiler meat remains a common mode of transmission to humans. Since the proportion of under-cooked chicken is largely unknown, an assessment of various cooking methods would serve to prioritise intervention strategies that are required to ensure food safety. Cooking time and temperature for fried, boiled, baked, and grilled cook-ing methods, determined from survey and sampling methods, and D-values from published data were inputs into a modi-fied model. The model was constructed in a Microsoft ExcelTM workbook, and simulated using @risk add-in computer software, 100,000 iterations, and Latin Hypercube Sampling. Thermal inactivation of Salmonella on broiler chicken meat occurred during boiling (0%) and frying (0%), but Salmonella survived baking (0.001%) and grilling (0.012%). Differ-ences in the expected value were due to differences in cooking time, temperature, environment, and size of broiler chicken cuts. Air, the heat transfer medium for both baking and grilling may be the most important factor linked to inadequately cooked broiler chicken carcasses.