New vagabonds who cook on an open fire sometimes have difficulty cooking food without either burning it or not cooking it thoroughly. Since getting diarrhea on the road is an awful experience (I nearly croaked one time when I got gastroenteritis from a bad hamburger in La Cruces) the two things vagabond cooks really have to master is washing dishes properly in the field and achieving proper cooking temperatures.
My go-to cooking method is boiling. If you can boil it, it's about 99% going to be cooked safely. For vandwellers, you can carry more gear, and a pressure cooker is a very handy kettle to have. If you pressure cook a meal for fifteen minutes (120 degrees at 15 psi) it will eliminate virtually every living thing inside that pressure cooker. (This is the pressure and temp of an autoclave, like is used in hospitals to sterilize instruments.)
Any vegetables dumpster-dived out of a grocery store dumpster must be washed well and cooked thoroughly to be safe. Dumpstering food in wintertime when the ambient temperature is lower than 38 degrees is a shit ton safer. (Edit: Your refrigerator maintains a temperature of between 37-38 degrees F, the temperature at which bacterial reproduction slows almost to a stop.) If it's warmer than 38 degrees outside, I'd take a pass unless the food is very recently placed in the dumpster. Food that has been cooked already (like pizza, etc.) is safer. Meat? Not so much. If you decide to eat meat from a dumpster, cook the hell out of it.
I got these temperatures off another Reddit post.
<Cook here! Bacteria starts dying at 130F. That's the minimum temp for being "cooked". Whatever the outside temp is, the inside generally must reach at least this temperature, however long it takes.
135F is the internal temperature of rare steak.
140 F is holding temp, for medium rare. Not high enough to really break down tissue, but not low enough for bacteria to grow.
160 F is the internal temperature of chicken that is safe to eat
180 F is the temp for poaching a food, something delicate that can't handle a boil. Water transfers heat more efficiently than air.
212 F is the temp water boils at. Boiled potatoes takes 12~ minutes, same cut/size to roast is 40~
250 F is a temp you would cook something at for hours, like smoking a pork shoulder for 6 hours.
350 F is a good temp for roasting something over a moderate amount of time
425 F won't cook anything to 160 in the middle, but it will make the outside crispy very fast.
500 F+ is for pizza>
(As a reminder, paper catches fire and burns at 451 F.)
Submitted February 15, 2017 at 09:00PM by KaBar2 http://ift.tt/2lPrY1p vagabond
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