Avoiding Thanksgiving Day Food Poisoning: Using a Red Wine-Based Marinade to Protect Against E. coli and Salmonella

Many of my readers from the United States will be sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner with their friends and families, celebrating life and giving thanks to what we have.  Since my husband and I just moved 1600 miles across country, arriving in our new [temporary] home just this past weekend, we decided to stay put and have a small and very intimate Thanksgiving feast with just the two of us, plus our two four-legged friends.  We’ve got the Cornish hen thawing and the “special” wines sitting here in our little 1 bedroom apartment waiting patiently to be reunited with the wine fridge that is currently in storage.

As with any food preparation and cooking involving meat, you already know you should take precautions to ensure you don’t get food poisoning from things like E. coli or Salmonella.  Wash your hands, wash your

prep area, and say a silent prayer that you turkey was handled in such a way that it was not inadvertently contaminated before it landed in the grocery store aisles.

Extracts made using red wine or grape skins have been studied often for their antimicrobial characteristics.  For example, The Academic Wino covered a piece on the effects of using red wine extracts in beef marinades to protect against three different strains of Salmonella, which showed promising results (read that article here).  Similarly, another study covered by The Academic Wino showed that extracts made from grape skins and seeds were effective in acting as natural antioxidants for use as a chicken meat preservative (read that article here).

Recently, more work has been done on the subject of red wine extracts and the preservation and protection of meats against both Salmonella and E. coli, two common bacterial contaminants observed in all different types of meats (including your Thanksgiving turkey).  None of the results were particularly groundbreaking or anything of that sort, but instead add more support to idea that red wine-based extracts may be beneficial for preserving and protecting meats for consumption.

Brief Methods:

Note: if you’d like more detailed information regarding either the methods or the results, just ask!  I’m happy to look into it and hopefully answer your questions!

This particular study looked at several different treatments:

1. Red wine only
2. Red wine & olive extract
3. Red wine & oregano essential oils
4. Red wine & olive extract & oregano essential oils
5. Red wine & apple extract
6. Red wine & lemongrass essential oils
7. Red wine & apple extract & lemongrass essential oils
8. Red wine & green tea extract
9. Red wine & bitter almond essential oils
10. Red wine & green tea extract & bitter almond essential oils

The study basically looked at the effectiveness of these 10 treatments on preventing the growth of either E. coli or S. enterica (Salmonella) at two different pH levels and a few different temperatures.

Brief Results

• Interestingly, though it has been studied and assumed that red wine alone has antimicrobial characteristics, the red wine alone treatment in this study was NOT effective against E. coli or Salmonella. I would suspect the concentrations of antimicrobial compounds in red wine alone are not at high enough concentrations to just slap it on the meat and go forth with no contamination.
• Red wine plus the plant extracts (i.e. olive, apple, green tea) were only somewhat effective against coli and Salmonella infection, though it was not the best performer.
• Red wine plus the essential oils (i.e. oregano, lemongrass, and bitter almond essential oils) were all highly effective against coli and Salmonella infections.
• Red wine plus plant extracts plus essential oils showed varied effectiveness:
  • In general, the combination of the three ingredients was more effective in protecting against Salmonella than coli.
  • In general, the combination of the three ingredients was more effective at a lower pH of 3.6 than a neutral pH of 7.
  • In general, microbial activity in all treatments increased with increasing temperatures.
• The greatest antimicrobial effects were seen in those red wine treatments containing lemongrass essential oils.

Conclusions

So, science yet again has shown that red wine-based extracts may be good for protecting your meats against microbial infections from things like E. coli or Salmonella.  According to this study, the combination of red wine and lemongrass essential oils seemed to perform the best.

You can easily purchase any of these ingredients from a grocery or natural foods store, so if you’re feeling a little wild and want to experiment with recipes a bit this year, maybe incorporate a red-wine and lemongrass essential oil-based marinade for your Thanksgiving turkey.  Add any other plant extract you want, as while none of the three tested in this study proved to be far superior to any other in terms of

antimicrobial activity, they certainly didn’t make things worse!  Pick what flavor combinations taste good to you, and go for it!  Marinate it in the refrigerator since microbial activity increases with increased temperature.

I might just have to marinate our little Cornish hen in a red wine/essential oil solution this year!

Cheers and Happy Thanksgiving!

Source:

Friedman, M., Henika, P.R., and Levin, C.E. 2015. Antimicrobial activities of red wine-based formulations containing plant extracts against Escherichia coli O157:H7 and Salmonella enterica serovar Hadar. Food Control 50: 652-658.