Media Platforms Design Team

Spend a lot of time around restaurant cooks and there's a good chance you'll turn into a whiskey drinker with an above-average swearing vocabulary. You'll also be exposed to the kind of late-night banter that reveals the city's best taco stand or revolutionizes the way you scramble eggs. Earlier this year I overheard some chefs talking about certain little-known yakitori joints that will, by request, cook their chicken skewers to a mouthwatering medium-rare. That's one you don't hear every day: chicken served pink.

Chicken breast is boring. It has the charisma of Tim Pawlenty and the texture of an old tennis ball. It tastes like you're being punished for something. Which is a shame, because chicken breast is such a practical sort of meat, being that it's lean, affordable, and widely available.

But the yakitori tip got me thinking about what sets chicken apart, which isn't the meat itself but how we're taught to cook it. One of the first things any novice cook is taught is that when working with chicken, we must blast it with heat to lay waste to every last microbe. We cure pork and call it ham, order duck breast medium-rare, savor lamb chops served blue, but we won't serve an Oven Stuffer Roaster whose juices aren't running clear. I thought that maybe pink chicken might not only taste better but eliminate an item from my list of things to fear while cooking.

But first, there was the small matter of salmonella. I spoke with a number of poultry scientists and discovered that while it's plausible that salmonella (a bacterium that, by the way, is hardly unique to chickens) could show up on a chicken's skin and contaminate cutting boards, the chances that it works its way inside a muscle, like the breast, all by itself? Very, very slim, and really no different from the odds of E. coli camping out in a medium-rare steak. The Centers for Disease Control has documented five salmonella outbreaks this year, none of which involved eating chicken.

To be clear: ingesting almost anything involves a certain level of risk. But if you've ever eaten supermarket cold cuts, potato salad at a steamy August cookout, or any food while vacationing in Mexico, pink chicken should rest squarely within your food-safety comfort zone. Still, the question remained whether pink chicken was, in fact, a tastier alternative to what we're used to. There was only one way to find out: Pour a cold glass of vodka (antiseptic) and array six chicken breasts on the counter. Leave one raw and roast the others how we like our steak: rare, medium-rare, medium, medium-well, and the USDA's recommended temperature for chicken, 165 degrees. And eat them.

First up was a sliver of raw breast. It was slippery, limp, bloodless, room temperature, and for all those reasons, not recommended. The best turned out to be the one cooked medium-well, about 150 degrees. It was what we'd classify as "pink" when you cut into it, but the distinguishing feature wasn't the color of the flesh so much as its sheen and a hint of translucency. The well-done meat we're used to is a firm fist of hot, parched, matte-hued muscle. By contrast, medium-well chicken is supple, glossy, warm, and explosively juicy. Riskier to eat than well-done? Maybe. But worth it. Plus: one less thing to worry about.

Illustration by Wesley Merritt

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