Poisoning danger of recipes in Gwynnie’s new cookbook
SHE has been ridiculed for her outlandish nutritional recommendations, from bone broth to powdered fungi smoothies. But Gwyneth Paltrow has now found herself in trouble with academics – for putting fans at risk of food poisoning.
Previously, the A-lister has raised eyebrows by suggesting that drinking nothing but goats milk for eight days could help fight ‘parasites’. This time, however, she has incurred the wrath of experts with a chicken recipe advice that overlooks the risk of salmonella and campylobacter.
The 44-year-old’s roast chicken recipe, in her cook book My Father’s Daughter, was criticised for failing to give followers an end temperature that the dish should reach. In an analysis of 29 cook books, researchers found fewer than 9 per cent included the temperature cooked meat should reach before being eaten.
The cook books, many by celebrity chefs, also neglect to tell people about simple hand-washing or to avoid washing chicken under the tap – something Miss Paltrow suggests in another book, It’s All Good.
This flies in the face of advice from the UK Food Standards Agency, which warns people never to wash raw chicken because of campylobacter. The agency’s states: ‘Thorough cooking kills it. Campylobacter can be spread easily and just a few bacteria could cause illness.’ Campylobacter affects more than 6,000 a year in Scotland.
The bug causes severe diarrhoea, abdominal pains and a fever which can take up to ten days to pass.
Senior study author Professor Ben Chapman, a food safety specialist at North Carolina State University, said: ‘I wanted to see in the Gwyneth Paltrow recipe somewhere that we know a chicken is done when it reaches 74C (165F). It provides the temperature and how long it should be cooked for but, while that is good information, it doesn’t mention what temperature it should be at the end.’
Only 89 out of 1,497 recipes studied gave readers reliable information they could use to reduce their risk of food poisoning, while 34 gave unsafe advice. The paper, published in the British Food Journal, says more information is needed on cross-contamination by uncooked meat.
My Father’s Daughter was not formally included in the study, but was separately mentioned by Prof Chapman. It’s All Good, a 2013 cook book by Miss Paltrow which does warn home cooks to remove their chicken from the oven at 74C (165F), was included in the study.
Grand Central Publishing, which publishes Miss Paltrow’s cook books, said the chicken recipe in My Father’s Daughter included that the chicken should be roasted at 400F for 70 minutes, ‘ample time to cook a three to four pound chicken’. It said It’s All Good included end point temperatures.