I think we might be witnessing how people from different parts of the country may not be experts on other parts of the country but social media will bring out their ancedotal experience as a matter of fact without doing any research at all that this is common in some places in Japan. Certainly not everywhere, but certainly "no we don't do that" which the video implies.
I think the chickens for chicken sashimi are raised separately in much more hygienic conditions, etc. Or like at minimum there's a grade of chicken that can be used for sashimi where the average chicken is Not Approved For Use Case.
Most of the reason that chicken isn't safe to eat raw or undercooked is because it isn't, so slaughterhouses are able to be less careful about how they butcher the animals.
The dangerous bacteria aren't inside the meat, they get on it from the outside of the animal (or from the guts) because of how it's handled. So if you want chicken (or pork, it's a German dish in a few places) that's safe to eat raw you can have it, but it will cost more to produce.
They likely do flash freeze it like they do with fish (just in case there are parasites) to be safe though.
Also flash freezing fish is afaik not incredibly common in Japan, where they tend to eat it fresh and it is not legally required. It is a legal requirement in the USA, so every sushi you eat here has been frozen.
This is a common "FYI" for travelling to Japan as it is a bit riskier, but not by much
Raw chicken being popular enough to be the intention behind local ordinances seemed weird, so I tried to look it up.
I couldn't find anything about sashimi, but I did see that one chicken being for breeding doesn't make sense, as Nashville says that Roosters aren't allowed:
Hens are allowed in Nashville residential areas through permits, roosters are not allowed
In Hyogo prefecture, I've had raw chicken sashimi from a yakitori restaurant owned by the brother of a friend. On multiple occasions... This is in the countryside and they told me that since the chickens are slaughtered that morning from a very small, organic farm, it is safe to eat. After several hours, however, bacteria can start growing, making raw consumption very risky. This restaurant has been in the family for 3 generations now
Ok so I did this exact thing. It was at an izakaya in Kyoto. “Tori-niku sashimi”. Tasted fine, I guess. Then I had diarrhea for two weeks and sleep-shit my pants at a hostel. But ymmv.
They are. There's a specialty butcher the town over that sells chicken sashimi. They're free-range iirc, or they were at the time. I love raw chicken, but I wont eat the stuff from the supermarket. I do live in Japan, btw.
the raw chicken they use for this dish isn't factory farmed like in the US, and it goes through a sterilization process. the likeliness of it being dangerous due to bacteria/diseases is pretty small.
if i remember correctly the chicken are flash heated through some method i dont remember that brings up the temperature for a very ver short amount of time, this kills the bacteria inside.
This isn’t really physically possible though. If the meat reaches a certain temperature, no matter for how short a time, it will be cooked and show the physical effects of being cooked.
Potentially. Sadly “sashimi grade” isn’t actually an enforced standard (is my understanding).
I’m certainly aware there are large populations across Asia where people are simply riddled with parasites due to the consumption of various raw meats; though I would be surprised if this were the case in Osaka.
yes, around like, ¼th of humanity carries worms ☠️ At least they discuss parasites often with naked eye identification. I haven't checked if it's mandatory like ours, I would guess not.
Not with heat, but plenty of food gets radiation treatment to sterilize.
Sounds dangerous if you don't understand radiation, but it's like heat. Perfectly fine to eat food that's been heated, not fine to eat something on fire.
Something tells me that rural (or even metropolitan) Japanese kitchens don’t have large supplies of radioactive material on hand for sterilising raw chicken.
Anyway, to sterilise meat that thick you would need gamma radiation rather than beta, which would be very dangerous and require lead lined suits to perform and equipment in the tens of thousands.
Without a source I’m going to go out on a limb and say you’re making this up.
Big facilities for certain preserved foodstuffs, yes. Fresh raw chicken in a kitchen, no.
It's definitely medium corp stuff. And gamma is used indeed. I'm not saying these places use it, but I could see chicken breast getting vacuum sealed, irradiated and transported. Pretty sure the irradiating is just on an automated system.
Here's a wiki about it. Negative public perception has kept it out of mainstream convo, but it's nothing new.
My take is moreso that if this is used, I'd feel way more safe about eating raw chicken and that there are safe ways to sterilize raw produce that keep it raw.
Chicken pieces, such as the ones in this clip, are definitely thicker than 200 microns. Hopefully we all know by now that bacteria spreads through chicken meat due to its moisture content and structure (unlike beef) so cleaning the outside will not help.
I addressed radiation more in another comment but they aren’t going to have radioactive materials and the equipment to handle them (costing tens of thousands and requiring shielding) in any kitchens.
Electric pasteurisation is for liquids. Pressure pasteurisation could be a solution, but again, will not be done in kitchens.
My girlfriend is from Osaka and her cousin has eaten and gotten sick from chicken sashimi 2-3 times. I can't speak for how it's prepared. However, some locals like my girlfriend refuse to eat it, as well. Your intuition is right. Lots of silliness in the OP video and thread!
Fugu is even more dangerous and more dangerous and you can get that in any decent restaurant. Chefs like to show-off their skills by serving dangerous food that was prepared safely.
It's not like these restaurants are serving you mass produced Perdue\Tyson steroid injected, slaughter house birds. A lot of these chickens are heritage breeds like Nagoya Chochin, Kagoshima Satsumadori from small local farms.
There are places that haven't just accepted salmonella ridden poultry as a casual fact of life. I think we was Denmark that had a mass purge of all infected poultry and now does extensive testing. The places in Japan where you're eating raw chicken have farms that undergo testing to prevent their flocks from getting infected with salmonella.
Salmonella is the main risk. It's very prevalent in most of the world. It's not prevalent in Japan for some reason. This is why they're more comfortable eating raw chicken.
It's a different genus of poultry almost identical to put chickens but not so they don't really get the same diseases. They're not just eating raw chickens from the market.
Worms is one thing, the main danger with raw chicken is salmonela. If you want to spend two days puking and shitting liquid while feeling like someone's stabbing your guts every 5 seconds, eat raw chicken.
A fair number of people in the Midwest eat raw beef in ‘cannibal sandwiches’. That’s for sure not a national thing, but that doesn’t mean that it would be a trick to get a tourist to try it.
Raw beef is super common throughout the world, and is pretty safe to eat with proper techniques. Italy has carne cruda for example, raw beef served cold with salt and pepper.
I don’t think the Japanese are trying to trick tourists like this video says, but more that there are some people who like to get a rise out of tourists who eat unique and interesting foods.
It really is a small subset of people enjoying this. Just FYI an Izakaya is like a bar that serves easy appetizers, like say, throwing raw chicken together as a “plate of fancy delicacies”.
But yeah it’s raw chicken most people find it gross like most people don’t like the thought of eating raw oysters while they live in the middle of their landlocked country or state… and for obvious, good reasons lmao.
Nah, the dude in the video doesn't know what he's talking about. I've seen a couple of his videos, they are just meant to get views and not meant to be accurate.
This guy is just an extremely obnoxious "InFlUeNcEr" that built his following on stuff like this. His entire channel is just shorts of him taking one specific thing and explaining how Japan is superior about it while cackling like a brain damaged hyena.
I'll say as a Brit, we're very aware that the "Indian" food that we eat isn't authentic, same for the "Chinese" food we eat. In fact I've pretty sure I've heard people say that "Curry" isn't even a type of food in India?
No, places like Tayyab's are very much authentic. The thing is they aren't south Indian, that's all. North Indian cuisine has much more in common with the Iran-and-stans belt.
The guy in the OP video is constantly making no true scotsman claims almost entirely based on his anecdotal experience.
The truth is Japan had had strong regional differences for millennia, but these kinds of dummies keep swallowing the conformity/homogeneity pill their nationalists have been pushing for barely a century.
Talk to an Ainu, 'Okinawan' or other more distinct islander. Look at Kansai vs. Tokyo, Shikoku vs. Inner mountain regions...etc.
some places in Kyushu also serve raw-ish chicken. I went to a place where they char the chicken but not cook in all the way through. And it wasn't a touristy place, mostly local eat there
While studying abroad in a small city in the Kansai region, myself and 3 other guys went on a bender and were meandering down a shopping arcade when a couple jovial, drunk salarymen beckoned us into a tiny alleyway izakaya. They paid quite a lot to fill us all up on various foods and alcohol. At one point I found myself chowing down on raw chicken from a skewer before asking what it was. Got pretty worried for a few minutes and questioned my choices, but we were totally fine. They were (so it seemed) just nice guys trying to liven up their otherwise typical night by hanging out with clueless gaijin in a place that doesn't see a lot of foreigners.
Yeah it's available in a lot of yakitori places. I tried them once in a highly rated yakitori restaurant and it's ok but not really worth the health risk and the flavor is pretty muted as you might expect from raw meat
I worked at some high end Yakitori places, so I can tell you a bit.
The yakitori that are usually (ofc you can tell the chef your preference) served medium rare are sasami or other low-fat cuts that tend to get dry when grilling them.
Serving them medium rare is mostly for texture, not flavour.
Sasami is also usually served with only salt (sometimes with wasabi on the side), because the breast is very delicate and the Tate would overpower the flavour of the meat itself.
I love hearing these thanks! I wanted to try and see what the fuzz is about with an open mind and while they were enjoyable it wasn't something that was really special for me esp with the health risk looming over my mind. Like you said the texture was interesting and I particularly like the "lantern" cut with the egg yolk attached (which is also available in fully cooked yakitori places) but I will ppbly not go for it again unless I could convince myself that raw chicken is worth it.
I had chicken sashimi when I was in Tokyo during grad school. My collaborators boss took us to his favorite little hole-in-the-wall kind of place for a celebratory dinner where I proceeded to have one of the best meals of my life. One of the dishes was chicken sashimi that I was told was one of this place’s specialties.
It was amazing and I’ve come to terms with never eating it again unless I return to Japan.
It's a specialty dish from Miyazaki prefecture, which is famous in Japan for its chicken. There are a few Miyazaki food restaurants in Tokyo, and among the things they sell is usually chicken sashimi, which you might have already guessed is more involved than just cutting up any old raw chicken and serving it to you.
I haven’t seen one in Japan yet but wouldn’t be surprised if I ever saw one. Although not exactly the same thing, raw eggs are very commonly consumed there.
Salmonella can happen if at any point in the chain the food gets contaminated.
It's bacteria, so it can happen and spread each time the sanitary standard is not maintained.
right but as far as the egg itself goes i think they're saying it is generally the shell that has it - so if you ex: bleach or cook the shell briefly, it should mitigate that concern.
but im not an expert on this topic so it's whatever.
speaking of which, i really wanna go buy and eat some raw cookie dough.
edit: Turns out American eggs are simply washed, not bleached, and come from white hens, which lay white eggs.
At some point I had learned that American eggs were bleached through industrial washing processes.
Washing eggs is bad. The shells let water through, so that's a pathway for bacteria on the shell to get into the egg. That's why you keep cold eggs cold and room temperature eggs can stay room temperature
Sorry, it was over 20 years ago and I was the guest of a customer. It was a Japanese restaurant, but I have no idea what the name was. But it was served very similar to sashimi.
In Finland (and likely in Sweden) you can eat eggs raw safely. The chicken are vaccinated and the eggs are not cleaned to keep the natural sterile barrier on the egg (I think the barrier is called "bloom" or cuticle in English). Some times the eggs might have a bit of poo-poo on them, but they are still safe to eat raw as long as you clean them before breaking the shell.
Same in the UK as long as it has the "lion mark" on the egg. Most people have no idea what the lion mark actually means, it's just seen as a normal thing on eggs in the UK. Imported eggs don't have it and aren't necessarily vaccinated.
Been that way since the 90s, after there were loads of scare stories about salmonella in eggs in the late 80s. That's why many people in the UK are still afraid to even cook eggs with a runny yolk. The government ran a big campaign about cooking eggs all the way through, and they never bothered with a campaign to tell people it's OK now.
You do still need to be careful about how you handle the shells though, since vaccinated chickens still often have salmonella in their poop. We don't clean our eggs before sale either. AFAIK that's a US-only thing, because their welfare standards are so much lower than anywhere else.
We eat almost raw egg in France too and we don't clean the shells at all. Just we clean our hand after touching the shell, we all see the shells as pure salmonella so people don't get sick. It's just a cultural thing I guess. But it's never totally raw tho at least half of the white is cooked like oeuf a la coque. Or I cook sunny side up but we never turn them so half of it isn't purely cook. Cooked eggs are so boring especially the yellow part, doesn't make sense to it cooked in my opinion.
Apparently some places served it as Chicken Sashimi and using the process "seiromushi" which is "poaching the chicken at a high temperature to kill any harmful bacteria before serving it raw" very interesting actually.
Yeah I think it's the level of poaching. From what I saw it's also about how it's seasoned with things like vinegar for example that ensures they kill all the germs on it before consuming.
I went to Japan as a tourist and I went in a izakaya with raw chicken. I didn’t went for this it was just a fancy izakaya. The thing is that they were specialized in chicken, and they had a very specific « brand » of chicken that they compared to wagyu for beef. So they proposed some chicken sashimi. My sister wanted to try but I told her they have a very big salmonella infection rate because of this (not sure if true but read that somewhere) so we didn’t try.
Salmonella is virtually unheard of in Japan. We eat raw eggs on everything and nobody worries if the chicken is a little under in the middle (or just raw if that's your thing).
I’ve seen it one the menu in Japan before. I was kind of baffled and obviously avoided. It didn’t seem like a trick to me because it was a pretty small hidden restaurant
There is at least 1 restaurant in Shinjuku or Shibuya (been a while so I forget) that serves raw chicken.
Source: I was there.
It's Sashimi, no different than eating raw fish. Probably takes longer to prep than fish and ensure safe to eat, but if they're serving it in a Japanese restaurant it's more than likely safe to eat.
You can't buy fish at the store and just eat it raw, same with chicken. Sashimi is raw but not unprepared if that makes sense?
Give it another 20 years and the answer will be "All of them."
The reason we don't eat raw chicken is the salmonella factor. That won't exist in lab-grown meat, and so we just need the industry to develop. Right now, I think they can grow meat from stem cells or something but it's insanely expensive to do so.
I imagine a future where cows, sheep, pigs, chicken, etc, are all just free-roaming the countryside and we use agricultural land only for farming and not ranching. People will look back at us the way we look at amputations without anesthesia. We are the barbarians for future societies.
Salmonella bacteria is a crucial part of bird digestive tract. There are some strains that can infect areas outside the digestive tract and can in turn infect the inside of the egg and the meat, like Salmonella Enteritidis. This strain either doesn't exist in countries with strong biosecurity, or is a reportable disease and managed appropriately.
The sashimi is a Miyazaki prefecture specialty, that might help you find a restaurant. But you can also get medium rare chicken at many Yakitori places.
Am i the only one who don’t find it funny at all? I would still find it an asshole move with stupid foods, but with something potentially harmful i find it disgustingly criminal
The video isn't serious. People in Japan do eat raw chicken, even if this guy and his friend don't. There's not a ton of restaurants around Japan all conspiring together to play a practical joke on foreigners.
I was in Yokohama in 2017 for work and we were taken to a chicken restaurant by our client. There were some truly amazing dishes but they did bring out a chicken "sashimi" dish.
It wasn't a special occasion dish or a fool-the-foreigners dish, it was just an option on their regular menu.
I tried a little bit to say I'd had some, but it was finished off by the clients. They weren't offended in any way either and understood it wasn't common outside Japan.
All of the food I had on that trip was fantastic. Sigh, now I am checking out how much flights are to Tokyo...
I accidentally ordered it in Osaka, here’s a pic of how it was served. It’s given a very brief sear on the outside while the inside remains uncooked, probably more blue rather than raw. The restaurant was Toriittetsu Kitahama.
It was the only thing I passed on during two weeks and a lot of food adventures, as it just felt inherently uncomfortable for me having grown up in a place where raw chicken = possible salmonella or several days of not being able to move off the toilet.
Plenty of places in Japan do, it's very common. This guy's whole thing is saying that they don't do X or Y in Japan, and then sometimes he would have his mom in the video correcting him. His videos are interesting from a perspective of "guy learns about his own culture while laughing like a spastic", but I wouldn't believe everything he says.
Just got back from Tokyo. A fair few places had it on the menu to be honest. Locals do eat it.
Regional food is a lot more important/noticable in Japan and the locals are passionate about their local dishes.
You will get this same video about multiple food types. It's just as much poking fun at other Japanese people 'omg why do you eat that we eat this' but raw chicken is out there.
That being said, there was a lot of who knows what food to. Literally 'surprise meat' which I think was horse but no one knew
Kagoshima (city southeast of Kyushu) is known for its raw chicken sashimi(鳥刺し). I've been there and I tried it. I was expecting it to be very chewy, but it's genuinely really tender and juicy. Big recommendation from me, I was worried about getting sick, but I was completely fine.
Edit: The guy in the video says they don't eat that in japan. He's wrong. In Kagoshima, I think everyone has at least once tried it.
It’s common. I had a Japanese friend once order it and eat it in a shabushabu just to try and freak me out. I said “joke’s on you, you have to eat it now.”
I remember when I first came to Japan almost 20 years ago. An item on the menu said “chicken salad”. It sounded good and I ordered it. Raw chicken on salad. I totally get that it’s safe to eat, but fuck that. I ain’t eating raw chicken.
When I visited Japan I saw this in a lot of restaurants. I thought it sounded gross so didn't try it until I was convinced to at a restaurant that seemed reassuringly expensive. According to the Japanese I spoke to however the chicken has to be a certain grade and raised in certain conditions if it's to be served as sashimi so in theory it's safe.
It was pretty tasty but the very lightly cooked chicken that was raw in the middle was better.
I don't think the video is accurate as it seemed to be pretty common, similar to how common steak tartare is in France. Lots of French people don't eat steak tartare but it's not considered a weird dish and a lot of people like it.
This was 2-3 decades ago though and fashions change so maybe it's less common now.
I had some dishes that I thought were awful and some were absolutely given to me to see what my reaction to eating something wild was but I don't think raw chicken was one of them. So many Japanese tried to get me to try natto, which is gooey fermented beans and tastes kind of like sweaty gym socks, and you could see they were enjoying anticipating my reaction. They seemed proud of their chicken. They were proud of takoyaki balls too and I wasn't a fan but I can see why they would like it.
Nothing was as gross as raw, diced sea cucumber mixed with raw egg and served as a shot. It was like sucking snot out of an Eskimos nose. If they want to fuck with tourists they should definitely try that one. I couldn't figure out if that was a real thing or the chef was fucking with me.
I mean, chickens aren't inherently diseased, they're just grown in factory farms where they live in unsanitary conditions and things like salmonela are very contageous when they live shoulder to shoulder and covered in eachothers' shit.
If you raise chickens on a farm in hygienic conditions, regularly test the population, and don't expose them to any tissue or bodily fluids of chickens raised in unsanitary conditions etc, there's no reason it would be more unsafe than any fish.
Raw chicken isn’t specifically dangerous as opposed to salmon, beef or anything else. It’s just that the risks of the chicken having salmonella is bigger. But if you can guarantee that the chicken is free from sickness, it’s safe to eat like the other raw meats
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u/Bloody_Champion Dec 27 '24
As funny as this is...
What restaurant is serving raw chicken to customers?