Can You Thaw Out A Turkey At Room Temperature

You can safely cook a frozen turkey overnight at a low temperature.

Can you thaw out a turkey at room temperature.

No safety issues as long as you thaw it cold. The laws of physics are apparently different north of the 49th parallel and poultry is required to reach 180f. Take your turkey out of the freezer early in the morning and it will be thawed by the afternoon. And the skin probably started to go rancid.

However you thaw your turkey use a digital tip sensitive thermometer to ensure it has reached an internal temperature of 165f. We call that temperature between 41. Besides the fact that it is let us say unseemly to defrost a thanksgiving turkey in some random bedroom to say nothing of the bathroom thawing a turkey at room temperature is a terrible practice. The first method is to leave the turkey in the refrigerator until it is completely defrosted.

That s why you never thaw a frozen turkey at room temperature on your kitchen counter or in hot water. When you thaw chicken at room temperature the outer edges can begin breeding bacteria before the middle begins to thaw. Thorough cooking would kill microbes but not necessarily all the toxins they may have produced. Even though the center of the package may still be frozen the outer layer of the food is in the danger zone between 40 and 140 f at a temperature where foodborne bacteria multiply rapidly.

We cannot over emphasize food safety when it comes to thawing turkey. That low temperature could be just what the harmful bugs need to thrive. Uncooked meat or poultry including frozen shouldn t be left at room temperature for more than two hours. A package of frozen meat or poultry left thawing on the counter more than 2 hours is not at a safe temperature.

There are three methods for thawing a turkey safely. If you thawed it out at. Don t thaw food in a dishwasher or your garage basement or on your back porch no matter how cold it is outside. If you purchased a frozen turkey leaving it out at room temperature is a potentially dangerous way to defrost it.

Use safe thawing techniques rather than leaving chicken out on your kitchen counter follow one of the handful of foodsafe thawing techniques as recommended by the usda. It s important to keep the whole turkey at a safe temperature throughout the thawing process to prevent bacterial growth that can lead to foodborne illness. I wouldn t eat a large turkey that had been thawed at room temperature.