The Reason High-Quality Chicken Can Still Look Pink When Cooked

One of the most universal food safety principles that most adults and even children know is that it's dangerous to eat undercooked chicken. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), raw chicken carries the risk of being contaminated with dangerous bacteria such as Salmonella, Campylobacter, or Clostridium perfringens, with Salmonella being the most common type of bacteria found in raw chicken. The CDC estimates that about 1 in 25 raw chicken packages in grocery stores are contaminated with Salmonella, so it's no wonder many people are worried when they see a bit of pink in their chicken. But fear not, as there is likely a totally safe reason your cooked chicken looks a little pink.

According to a Facebook video from chef Andrew Zimmern, as long as chicken has been cooked to 165 degrees Fahrenheit, a pink hue in your chicken shouldn't scare you off. "The better the quality of your chicken," Zimmern says, "the pinker your meat has the potential to be." The bones of younger chickens are generally more porous than older chickens, so the meat of younger chickens can have a pink hue due to the dark colored bone marrow seeping out into the meat closest to the bones, even after it's fully cooked. Another culprit behind rosy-tinted chicken meat could be myoglobin, a purple-hued protein that's more prevalent in muscles that are frequently used, like the dark meat parts of a chicken. 

As with many things in life, you need to fully understand the rules before you can bend them a little. As long as the chicken has been cooked to 165 degrees Fahrenheit, which is not only the food-safe temperature recommended by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), but also the ideal temperature for perfectly cooked chicken, you should have no fear of consuming chicken that may have a pink hue to it. However, ThermoWorks explains that what most professional chefs tend to do is cook white meat chicken to anywhere between 145 and 155 degrees Fahrenheit, with the caveat that the chicken must be held at 145 degrees Fahrenheit for almost nine minutes to safely negate the risk of bacteria. This temperature hold is easy to achieve with the sous vide, as the temperature of the water bath stays consistent. 

Even Andrew Zimmern says in his video that most of us are overcooking our chicken, and that he stops cooking his white meat chicken around 150 or 155 degrees Fahrenheit. For most home cooks, however, it's safer to cook chicken to at least 160 degrees Fahrenheit, and the heat carried over after removing the chicken from the cooking source will bring the temperature up to 165 degrees Fahrenheit.