Expert: Carol Schlitt - 11/25/2006

Question
For thanksgiving my mother made her usual stuffing for the turkey- it consists of hamburger and some seasonings.  She cooked it for five hours with the bird and it came out raw.  She removed it from the bird and baked it for another hour but it was still raw so she pan fried it then microwaved it.  Nothing she did would cook the stuffing, it was red and wiggly.  My brother tried a bit of the half cooked stuffing and it tasted good but the meat was not even half cooked let alone fully cooked.  My question is do you know what caused the meat to do that?  The meat was fresh from the store but why would it not cook after all that time?  The turkey was done perfectly but the stuffing was raw.  I hope you can answer this, everyone in my family is baffled and we all work in the food service industry so it's not like we are food novices.  Regardless of what we did though the meat would not cook... I'm not joking.  Thank you for your time!

Answer
Hi Nichole,

I've never heard of this happening so I'm going to forward this message on to our meat speacialist at the University of Illinois for his input.

If you'd send me your email address I'll correspond directly with you.  My email address is cschlitt@uiuc.edu.

Thanks Nichole for a very interesting question. Hopefully Dr. Tom Carr will be able to give some insight as to the reason for the uncookable meat.

Carol