Quote: (09-26-2012 12:46 AM)chakri Wrote:
Raw meat you buy from the store is never safe to eat as is, especially since you mentioned that you want to do that at least semi-often. The sashimi you get at the restaurants have been specially processed to be made more safe.
That's not entirely true. At the restaurant I run my seafood purveyor supplies a lot of sushi restaurants in Los Angeles. Yes, it's a damn good purveyor and the quality is excellent, but they follow the same HAACP standards as any other food retailer or purveyor. The quality that you get at Whole Foods, Costco, or Safeway isn't going to be as good as what I get, but it will be as safe. I would say grocery stores are more stringent in their standards actually to avoid food poisoning lawsuits.
For anyone concerned with bacteria, you can cook the outside of the fish with a very simple Japanese cooking method where you hold your fish in a strainer and ladle boiling water over the fish. This way you're not searing it and exposing it to high temperature fats, but you're "sanitizing" the outside which is where the majority of bacteria are harbored. Traditionally after doing this you would let it sit in a marinade of soy, ginger, and scallions for 10-15 minutes, then slice and serve.
On a final note, in the U.S. we have an abnormally high rate of allergies and food-related illnesses. I have two theories for this, both vaguely supported by data that's out there:
1) Processed food, whether it's ground beef or bagged spinach, comes from HUGE producers and HUGE processing plants and HUGE distributors. Because of the logistics at each one of these steps you open yourself up to many more risks of contamination than if you bought the same product from a small farmer who can directly supervise how he brings food to the table. And when outbreaks happen, they happen on a huge scale. It's never 3-4 people getting sick, it's hundreds.
2) Despite the occasional outbreak, the food that most Americans consume is, by and large, sterile. It's clean. Our meat is processed in laboratory-like conditions. Contrast that to a place like Mexico where meat is butchered and left to hang in open-air markets. The result? It's my belief that Americans have a weaker immune system because of it. We expose ourself to less bacteria, yet we have more allergies and sicknesses. The Mexicans and Central Americans I work with are almost never sick.
Eat some raw meat.