Hi moms, so I'm freaking out a bit. I made a turkey meatloaf recipe for dinner - it said to cook the loaf on a broiler plate for 40 min at 350. I cooked it at 350 in a bread pan/meatloaf dish thing for about 45-48 minutes. I used a meat thermometer and it was at about 140 degrees - I don't usually use a thermometer and glanced at the recipe, thinking it said once it reaches 140 it's done. Well, it tasted fine, but as my husband were eating dinner, I'm thinking to myself: wait, I know the temp for poultry is more like 160 degrees. Sure enough, I double check the recipe and it says 160 degrees! I'm so worried we're going to get sick! Anyone else ever pulled a serious cooking fail like this and not gotten horribly sick?? AAAAHHH!
You know, there's really nothing you can do now, so do whatever you need to do to take your mind off it- watch a movie or something. If you keep thinking about it, you're going to make yourself sick stressing about it- then you'll be afraid it was the turkey- it'll just snowball.
I've eaten undercooked meat and been fine. But, what's done is done, and you're probably going to be alright. The recipe for my meatloaf says 50 minutes, but in my oven it always takes 1 hour 20 min to fully cook.
Well the reason you would get sick is from contamination that could be in the turkey that could have gotten killed at a higher temperature. So just think about the possibility that the turkey could have been fine with out any germs in it. If that's the case, you could have eaten it raw. Obviously the cooking temperature is a precaution. Doesn't mean that all food will make you sick if it's not cooked. Just a perspective that hopefully makes sense. You won't automatically get sick from something undercooked. It has to have germies in it.
I am a real good cook. I am real careful with raw meat and cook things very carefully, but over done. Poultry is supposed to be cooked to 167 degrees because all of the little "animals" that could be in there die at 167 degrees. When I cook a turkey for Thanksgiving, I alwasy cook it to 170 degrees and have never gotten sick. (The pop up timers "pop" at 185 degrees so I never use one.)
That being said, IF (!!) you are going to get sick from under cooked poultry it will occur within 24 hours, at least in my experience, but I'm not a doctor. I wouldn't worry about it at this late stage.
Good luck to you and yours.
oh my goodness, this just happened to me!!! I did the same thing, turkey meatloaf 140 degrees and it cooked for 1 hour @ 375 degrees.
Did you get sick? my whole family ate it up except my son. It dawned on me also while eating it....humm, what is the temperature suppose to be?? Then I looked it up on line and yelled "everyone stop eating the meatloaf!" but as I said above I was already too late. Please tell me if you all got sick.
