# ACCIDENTLY turned off the oven half way through cooking...will the meat be ok?



## samy23 (Jul 23, 2008)

I accidentally turned off the oven about 30 minutes before needed....the meat had been cooking for 1 hour by then....and after 30 minutes had gone by I finally realised and turned the oven back on! Is the meat safe to eat? Im worried...and I've already eaten some!


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## Purple Sage (Apr 23, 2007)

Did you take the internal temperature of the meat? I don't think that the meat is ruined from having the cooking interrupted for only 30 minutes - that's not long enough for anything dangerous to build up to toxic levels. As long as it reached the right internal temp when you finished cooking it, then I think it's fine.


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## journeymom (Apr 2, 2002)

What kind of 'meat'? Beef or pork? Not chicken, right?

It's called tartare!







Frankly, you could probably put it back in the oven and finish cooking it to 'well done'. _Edited: oh I get it, you did finish cooking it after 30 minutes. Yes, I think it's fine._

People eat 'cold center' beef steak. And these days unless you're getting pork off the back of someone's truck, it's pretty safe to eat it still slightly pink in the middle.

A dense hunk of flesh is safest, because if you've cooked the surface completely, you've cooked most, if not all of the usual germs. Germs likely aren't going to be inside a piece of muscle (I suppose inner muscle parasites are possible, but not likely).

Ground meat is something else altogether, because the surface, and whatever bacteria might be there, gets ground into and mixed with the rest of it. I would not eat anything less than medium rare ground meat.

I bet you'd be sick by now, if you were going to get sick.


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## CherryBomb (Feb 13, 2005)

It should be fine. It takes a long time for the oven to cool down, so really it was probably still cooking, just at a lower temp. And since you turned the oven back on and finished cooking it, it should definitely be fine.


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