It was a drizzly Saturday two Januarys ago when, just after noon, I felt a cramp in my lower abdomen. I was standing in line outside a popular food truck and tried to ignore it the best I could. I made my way up to the widow and ordered a bountiful tray of barbecue for a friend and me to share. It was our second stop of the day. After a few bites, I had lost my appetite.
Something from our earlier meal was disagreeing with me, and it had caught up to me fast. The porta-potties outside the food truck weren’t going to cut it. We packed up the food, and a wave of intense pain persuaded me to let my friend drive. We found a gas station nearby, but a trip to the restroom offered little relief. For the hour-long drive home, I gripped the door handle, eyes closed, wincing at what felt like a sailor’s knot in my intestines being tightened by the Rock.
A doctor at the urgent care center later that afternoon said the pain wasn’t in the right place for appendicitis. He said it was food poisoning, and, given the rapid onset of symptoms, it was likely of the staphylococcal variety. My mind rushed back to the bowl of meaty pinto beans I’d been served that were still a little chilly. I’d made a note about the poor choice of serving temperature, but didn’t realize the bacteria that thrived in the lukewarm environment would take me on an eighteen-hour ride of intense and constant discomfort.
I’ve visited 2,365 different barbecue joints as of this writing, and that was the only time I’ve suffered food poisoning from barbecue (for you BBQ Confessional fans, that other time was from a salad, and it wasn’t at a barbecue joint). Most restaurateurs are familiar with food-safety practices, at least more so than the average home cook, but that doesn’t mean tragedies can’t happen. In 2015, a salmonella outbreak at TarHeel Q, in Lexington, North Carolina, infected 280 people and killed a 94-year-old man. Four years later, salmonella sickened at least 10 customers of Doug Sauls’ Bar-B-Q & Seafood, in Nashville, North Carolina. Most incidences of food poisoning go unreported, so there’s a good chance that a similar outbreak occurred at a Texas barbecue joint (I just couldn’t find any reports of one). I promise I’m not just picking on North Carolina, but in 2018, three hundred people were infected with C. perfringens at a church barbecue in Kannapolis, North Carolina, when large vats of Brunswick stew weren’t properly stored.
Smoked meats have some major advantages when it comes to more familiar causes of food poisoning, such as salmonella and E. coli. Both of those bacteria are killed off with proper cooking methods, and barbecue cuts like brisket, pork butt, and ribs are meant to be overcooked. Just make sure poultry reaches an internal temperature of 165 degrees. Again, this is basic information if you work in a restaurant kitchen. It’s all covered in the course required to get your food handler certification. And though I worked in restaurants during high school and college, I completed the course recently to keep the knowledge fresh, and so I could share some common mistakes backyard cooks might make when it comes to food safety.
Inspect Your Meat
Checking the expiration date on the meat you purchase is the most basic first step. Check the packaging, too. Is it damaged to the point that the meat is exposed? Briskets and pork butts are often packaged in plastic that is vacuum sealed. If the plastic is starting to inflate, there’s bad bacteria growing in there. And once the package is open, perform a smell test on the raw meat as a last line of defense. Your nose will tell you if the meat has spoiled. If in doubt, throw it out. Even a $100 brisket is less expensive than a doctor visit and prescriptions required to treat the food poisoning, not to mention your reputation with the neighborhood pitmasters.
Cross Contamination
When you let dangerous bacteria mix with otherwise safe foods, this is cross contamination. You used a platter to bring burger patties out to the grill. Can you use the same platter to serve the burgers? Not unless you wash it thoroughly—otherwise, you could cross-contaminate the safely cooked burgers with the E. coli from the raw meat. That cutting board you seasoned the brisket on? Don’t just wipe off the excess rub with a paper towel and call it good as a surface to slice the finished brisket. Clean it well, or, better yet, reserve a different cutting board for the task.
The easiest way to prevent cross contamination is to designate certain utensils, trays, and cutting boards for raw product and others for the cooked stuff. When cooking outside, do as much of the prep work as possible inside, near a sink, where you can wash the dishes and your hands after they’ve touched raw meat. Outside, use nitrile gloves that fit well to handle the raw meat, and throw the gloves away after. Store one of those bottles of hand sanitizer you hoarded in 2020 by the grill or smoker (the stuff doesn’t easily go bad) to keep your hands bacteria-free.
Watch out for more sneaky forms of cross contamination, too. If you handled the bottle of rub or, worse yet, dunked a hand soiled with raw chicken juices into the rub, throw it out when you’re done seasoning the rest of the raw meat. It’s better to keep a hand clean or gloved to handle the rub if you plan to use it at a later date. If basting the meat with sauce, don’t baste raw meat with the same mop or brush that you’ll use on the cooked meat. If your smoker has racks inside, don’t put raw chicken or ribs above briskets that are almost done. That’s not the juice you want dripping down onto that brisket bark. And those tongs you used to put the marinated pork chops onto the grill aren’t getting sanitized by the charcoal fire. Get a new set of tongs to handle your meat when it’s cooked and ready to eat.
Stay Out of the Danger Zone
This is as simple as keeping hot foods hot and cold foods cold, but that can be a challenge when serving at an outdoor event. The danger zone lies between 40 and 140 degrees Fahrenheit, where bacteria grows more readily on both raw and cooked foods. That’s why, no matter whom you heard it from, letting raw meat reach room temperature on the counter before cooking is a bad idea. That could take hours for a whole brisket. It can also take hours to cool down a fully smoked brisket that you’re planning to serve another day, so put it in the fridge early. A residential refrigerator isn’t designed to cool down a massive mound of meat such as a fully cooked brisket or pork butt quickly, especially if you load several in at one time.
The danger zone is also important to consider when reheating foods. A big pan of leftover beans or a whole-muscle cut such as brisket or pork butt is dense and will take hours to get back above 140 degrees. And that’s if you’re using a 350-degree oven. Allow for even more time if putting meat into a 225-degree smoker to reheat.
You may have heard that cooked vegetables, dairy, eggs (hello, potato salad), and raw and cooked meat shouldn’t be kept in the danger zone for more than six hours in total. That’s true, but there’s another important temperature milestone to pay close attention to when serving food that might not all get eaten quickly, like that half brisket that’s sitting on the block waiting for the next slice. Those same foods should be cooled from 140 to 70 degrees in two hours. Then you need to cool down the food even more, from 70 to 41 in the next four hours. So serve the food, then get the leftovers to a warmer or the refrigerator.
Calibrate Your Thermometer
All this knowledge of the danger zone isn’t much use if what you’re using to measure the temperature isn’t accurate. Calibrating a thermometer is pretty easy. Put some ice in a bowl, add just enough cold water to cover the ice, then stir it all together for twenty seconds. A thermometer dipped into the water next to an ice cube should read 32 degrees Fahrenheit.
You can get more information about foodborne illnesses from the CDC or the USDA, and the FDA has an entire page dedicated to food safety at barbecues. If you’re the neighborhood’s pitmaster, it might be a good idea to take a two-hour food-safety course before barbecue season is in full swing. Many options are available, but I took this one, offered for $15 by Texas A&M.
If you think you, your family, or your friends might be suffering from food poisoning, check your symptoms against those the CDC lists. If it comes on quickly, like mine did, it could be staphylococcus. It takes a few more hours for C. perfringens. Often, when people experience vomiting or diarrhea they believe to be related to food poisoning, they think of the meal they had immediately prior. But if it’s from salmonella, it could take six hours or six days for symptoms to begin. It takes at least a full day for E. coli symptoms to arrive. And if you feel like you can pinpoint the backyard pitmaster or restaurant that made you ill, please let them know. The knowledge is especially helpful if they hear from others with the same issue. Hopefully you get a better response than “How was the barbecue?,” like I did.
