How to make sure your chicken is properly cooked

HOW do you know when a piece of chicken is cooked? Most people think you can tell by looking at the colour, but it turns out this isn’t reliable.

Chicken is one of the riskiest foods for Salmonella and Campylobacter, two of the biggest causes of food-borne illness. These bacteria can be found on the inside of chicken meat, which is why chicken must be cooked through, unlike beef.

Muscle tissue changes colour when myoglobin, an oxygen-binding pigment similar to haemoglobin, is denatured. Chicken muscle, however, contains less myoglobin than most other kinds of meat, so the colour change is …