I'll admit I'm definitely one of those people who leaves their frozen meat out on the kitchen counter overnight. I can never find the time to properly thaw chicken so I let it sit there while I sleep. Then in the morning I take it out of the sealed package, wash it, place it in a large plastic container and season it before placing in the fridge. But here's the problem: Leaving meat–especially chicken–out for that long can be a pretty risky thing, health wise anyway. So what's the "right" way to defrost your chicken?
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I never thought there was anything wrong with leaving my frozen meat on the kitchen overnight until I found out how unsafe it really is. "If you think about leaving that chicken out on your counter top for half a day to defrost, it just doesn't sound appealing because you know it's going to spoil and go bad," Jeff Potter, the author of Cooking for Geeks, explained to the Huffington Post.
Apparently the best way to do it is placing your washed chicken in a plastic container and letting it sit in the fridge for a few hours. But what if you don't have a few hours to spare? What if you need to get cooking in, let's say, the next 15 to 20 minutes? How do you defrost this thing in a safe and QUICK way?
According to Potter, the trick is to have your chicken sit in a bowl of cold water. Yup, he actually recommends placing your tightly sealed pack of frozen chicken in a bowl and then turning on the tap to slowly run water over it until the bowl fills. It literally de-freezes in a matter of minutes. Makes sense, right?
Why not warm or hot water you ask? De-freezing chicken in warm or hot water is actually really dangerous–possibly more harmful than having it sit on the counter all day. "It's going to cook it, it also will actually aid in some of the temperature things you want to avoid," Potter adds.
So you see, the best and safest way to defrost chicken and in a quick amount of time is just having it sit in a cold water bath. My goodness, why didn't I think of this before?
Image via Thinkstock
