paulraphael
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Again am after actual references, aka modernist cuisime or the stuff by Douglas Baldwin, not anecdottal evidence.
Sorry but what that suggests to me is poor hygene while cooking or using spoilt meat.
My post should really just be a connect-the-dotsbased on what you already know. Many of the spoilage bacteria that have been studied have temperature / activity curves that are similar to pathogens. This means that when meat contaminated by these bacteria spends a lot of time between 5°C and 45°C, they multiply quickly. They are killed when the temperature rises much above this, but their byproducts (which are gross) aren't destroyed.
You will find examples of people complaining in online forums that their holiday dinner came out of the bag smelling like baby diapers. In all the cases I've seen, they did something along the lines of rolling or stuffing a big piece of meat. The results are entirely consistent with spoilage bacteria accumulating because the interior of the meat, predictably, spent a long time at temperatures that let these bacteria grow rapidly.
I don't have any peer-reviewed journal citations about this phenomenon. There isn't a lot of research money dedicated to spoilage bacteria (which are by definition not harmful, even if they're gross) and uncommon cooking methods. I've had my eyes out for such studies, but haven't found any. Nevertheless, the phenomenon I'm describing is completely logical based on what's already known.
Here's one study on spoilage bacteria growth rates (in poultry). The chart on p. 653 is most directly relevant. It shows rate of growth of the studied organisms 13 times higher at 22°C than at 1°C.
Consider a 3" diameter roll of beef cooked in 55°C water. It will take 5 hours for the center to pasteurize, and about 2 hours for the center to rise above 45°C, where (we assume, based on incomplete data) that spoilage bacteria slows down. With a 6" diameter roll of beef these numbers are over 2.6 times higher: 13.3 hours to pasteurize; 5.3 hours to 45°C.
So with a roll of meat that size, we're looking at 5 hours in a temperature range where bacterial multiplication is at its highest.
The message isn't "if you're not clean you can get spoilt meat." It's that we have to presume that anything that's been in contact with the exterior of meat is uncleanwhich means avoiding cooking methods for anything thus contaminated that puts it in an incubator for long periods. Or more simply, with long cooks, be aware of the difference between meat that can be presumed sterile and meat that can't.