We love chicken in our house! A lot of our favorite recipes use chicken, and we seem to never get tired of it, and trying out new recipes with it too!
But as the cooks for our family, we’re responsible for serving safe, healthy meals, so we wondered how you can tell that the chicken is spoiled just by tasting it.
If you have ever asked yourself, “What does bad chicken taste like?” or “How can I tell if chicken has gone bad?” then read on down to learn more.
What Does Bad Chicken Taste Like?
Bad chicken typically has a strong, unpleasant odor and a sour or ammonia-like taste. This is because bacteria, such as salmonella, campylobacter, and E. coli, can quickly multiply on the surface of raw chicken and produce toxins that give the meat a bad taste and odor. Additionally, as chicken begins to spoil, it will release chemicals that are responsible for its characteristic smell and flavor, which can become overpowering and unpleasant.
If you suspect that your chicken is bad, it is important not to taste it, as this can cause food poisoning. Instead, you should check for signs of spoilage, such as a slimy texture, discoloration, or an off-putting smell. If you notice any of these signs, it is best to discard the chicken and avoid eating it. It is always better to be safe than sorry when it comes to your health and food safety.
Other than taste, you can rely on two other criteria to evaluate whether your chicken is edible or not: color and texture.
If you detect purple chicken meat, mold on chicken, or unusually slimy chicken, they are signs for you to look back and check the chicken’s quality before cooking bad chicken!
On the other hand, when you go to a fast-food restaurant and have deep-fried chicken, you can only know the chicken was bad after you eat it.
In that case, swallowing a piece of bad chicken won’t affect your health, but you must detect the spoilage immediately to save yourself from eating more!
When you cook the chicken yourself, it’s best to tell if a chicken has gone bad due to its look and smell without the need to taste it.
Once you successfully recognize that the meat has gone bad, you can avoid facing the risk of eating bad chicken for you and your family.
How To Tell If Your Chicken Is Bad?
So, how to tell if raw chicken is bad so that you can refrain from taking them to cook?
You may wonder, what does bad chicken look like? The easiest sign to notice in a slice of rotten chicken meat is its color.
Fresh chicken meat will normally have a pale pink color with a shiny, firm meat texture on the outside.
However, a bad chicken will bring in a significant color change. Instead of being fresh pink, a bad chicken will have a dull, unappetizing gray color.
When there are more gray parts on the chicken than pink, it’s a sign showing that your chicken has spoiled.
If the gray part has not been too overwhelming, you can chop off that gray part, check the meat portion again before using it for cooking.
What does bad chicken smell like? The second sign that can help you to detect bad chicken is its smell.
If you can’t smell the fresh-protein smell from chicken like you always do, but instead a sour, unpleasant smell, then maybe your chicken is not good to use anymore.
Like any other food, bad odor means bad quality. You need to trust your cooking instance and figure out if the smell is normal or not.
If you fail to detect a bad chicken smell before cooking, you may find the smell continues to be more vivid when cooked.
The worse the odor of the chicken is, the more likely you need to replace that chicken portion with a new one.
The last sign you can use to discover a spoiled chicken is by feeling it. Since using your finger sense is more difficult than smelling or checking the color, you should only use this method after you have checked the two methods above.
Normally, when you let the raw chicken sit outside, its skin will be firm with a bit of glossy feel coming from its natural fat and skin without feeling sticky.
If you touch your chicken, and it seems to produce a slim substance that feels sticky, it is also a sign of spoilage in the chicken!
To prevent this situation from happening, you must understand how long can raw chicken sit out.
What Happens If You Eat Spoiled Chicken?
If you can’t figure out how to know when chicken is bad, you may accidentally eat spoiled chicken. Like we have said before, eating one piece of spoiled chicken won’t make you go to the hospital right away.
However, if you digest too much-spoiled chicken without knowing, it’s very likely that you may suffer from food poisoning.
Particularly, raw chicken and bad chicken breast contain harmful bacteria to the human’s health system like Campylobacter, Salmonella, and more.
Once these bacteria enter your body, they can cause severe effects of food poisoning: making you feel sick, vomiting with an extreme headache.
The symptoms can come in several hours after you finish eating, and the effects will last for 2-3 days, depending on how much bad chicken you digest.
Even famous chefs recommend not to cook and eat bad chicken in any circumstance to prevent extreme food poisoning that can kill you.
So, it would be best if you ensure that the chicken you eat is fully cooked. Take a look at this post on how to tell if chicken is done for a detailed explanation.
How To Store Chicken To Prevent Spoilage?
How to store chicken to prevent spoilage depends on what kind of meat you are dealing with.
For raw chicken which has not been cooked yet, storing it in the freezer is the best method. It is a great way to keep the meat fresh for a long period.
If you don’t intend to use chicken in the next 4-5 days, it’s best to store them in cold temperatures to ensure quality.
Keeping it in the fridge is fine, but you must use them within 1-2 days since the moisture in the fridge, along with other food’s smell, can easily downgrade your chicken’s quality.
Subsequently, do not let the raw meat sit at room temperature for more than one hour when you take it out to cook.
The room temperature can build an ideal environment for food bacteria to invade your chicken and make it spoiled.
Moreover, if you want to store your leftover kitchen, make sure to wrap them tightly before bringing them into the fridge.
It depends on how long you will use the chicken to store them in the freezer or the fridge. Both ways are great to store chicken, as they help lock the moisture and keep your leftover chicken fresh and tasty when you take it out to cook again.
In case you plan to cook the chicken in the following days, store them properly in the fridge or in the freezer. Additionally, have an overview on how to store fried chicken if you want to store the leftover fried meat.
The Final Word
And that’s our answer to the question, “What does bad chicken taste like?” It is not a fun experience eating bad chicken and getting food poisoning because of it, so you should learn how to detect bad chicken signs through tasting, smelling, and looking at the meat before cooking or eating it!
We hope that you will never get food poisoning because of bad chicken after reading this article. Thank you for reading this article, and we will see you soon!
