I guess this falls into “food safety” stuff. My local butcher keeps his pre-cooked andouille sausage in the case right next to trays of raw sausage and pork cuts. I use the cold andouille in sandwiches, and in omelets (where it probably won’t reach a safe temperature). Am I at risk eating it? Should I wash it before slicing it?
Good question. I would love to have a generic food safety thread. It tends to generate some strong opinions.
I would have to search some other sources first, like what would be the most likely concerns, and what might mitigate them.
Might be something useful here. Speaks to those at risk, and dry sausage, not everyone and all sausage.
" Should people “at risk” eat dry sausages?
Because dry sausages are not cooked, people “at risk” (older adults, very young children, pregnant women, and those with immune systems weakened by disease or organ transplants) might want to avoid eating them. The bacterium E. coli O157:H7 can survive the process of dry fermenting, and in 1994, some children became ill after eating dry cured salami containing the bacteria.
After the outbreak, FSIS developed specific processing rules for making dry sausages that must be followed or the product must be heat treated. These products are included in the FSIS microbial sampling program for E. coli O157:H7, and in 1997, FSIS began to test fermented sausages for Salmonella and Listeria monocytogenes."
So perhaps E Coli, Salmonella, Listeria monocytogenes?
Or this one
https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/ehs/ehsnet/plain_language/retail-deli-food-safety-practices.html
You were maybe hoping for a yes or no? 
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The andouille I get is smoked. Your first link says that smoked sausage is uncooked, but every other link I find says it’s either fully cooked or raw, and this is definitely not raw. Most other links recommend heating it, but googling “andouille cold” brings up uses like charcuterie plates, with no heating.
I’ll flag my original post so a mod can make a new topic. You’re right, there are strong opinions on this here!
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Interesting thread. I know all the ServSafe, USDA and FDA answers, etc., the time for food within the 40°F to 140°F temperature range and how long, and so forth.
But what people (and I am “people”, too) actually do is sometimes another matter altogether.
Take a more or less perfect scenario. You cook some kind of casserole to an internal temp a bit over 200°F and it stays there for a while, then you take it out and at some point sitting on the stovetop it drops below 140°F. Guidelines say it should not remain there long - no more than 2 hours. But that casserole, without disturbance, has very little active bacteria at this point - not entirely sterile, but not far from it.
But instead of the perfect scenario, you have guests who, while dipping their servings out of that casserole, well, they’re making conversation. Some of them might have an illness they’re not yet aware of, transmissible by their mouths or on their hands or whatever.
So the guideline about 2 hours once the temp for such a dish falls under 140°F is a sensible precaution, based on what happens when people are eating food.
If you instead had that same casserole and took it out of the oven at + 200°F pristine, and it sat pristine, covered, I’d guess (only a semi-educated guess) that it could last a whole lot longer than 2 hours at under 140°F without significant bacterial growth. Just a guess, though, as I said. And few people make food and treat it this way.
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Food safety is always avery emotive subject…
It is not an exact science and the rules/regulations differ per country.
Mostly those rules are aimed at people with a weaker constitution (I’m not a native English speaker. There may be a better way to say this).
So I look at it that way.
When cooking for others, I’m a lot more careful than when I cook for myself.
I am not going to deny myself steak tartare, soft boiled eggs, fresh mayonaisse, rare steak, street food etc.
Just my way of looking at things 
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Does the andouille touch the raw meat? If so, I wouldn’t eat it without cooking it if I were you.
“I would love to have a generic food safety thread” et voilà!
@naf ! What service!
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I wonder if the regulations state that cooked and uncooked cannot be on the same shelf, I.e. the butcher is breaking the law.
In the UK, there always seems to be a good separation between cooked and raw meat displays . I’ve never been sufficiently fussed to delve into the detail of the reasons for this, although I’ve always presumed it’s a food safety issue required by law.
Thermoworks has a good collection of articles on food safefy and monitoring it.
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Temperature related, or also contamination concerns?
Temperature.
I’ve been wondering about sous-vide. I cook fish fillets to 116F, rib-eye steaks to 128, 132 for tougher cuts like bavette and lamb chops, 145 for pork and chicken breast. Cooking time is about 45 minutes for the fish, 2.5 hours for the meats. The pork and chicken breast temperatures seem to be within safety guidelines, which I don’t fully understand, but not the other meats and especially not the fish. There are tables out there that show temperature vs cooking time, and I don’t understand those either.
I do also like medium-rare burgers, pink and juicy in the middle.
I believe I’ve had food poisoning only once, and don’t know what caused it.
I think I’ve found thermoworks pretty good for things like that. Is that where you’ve seen the charts?
One of them is in Kenji Alt-Lopez’s Serious Eats article:
But there are other articles that I might still have in one of my infinite browser tabs. Do you have a link to the Thermoworks page?
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Interesting @ipsedixit .
Serious Eats has some interesting ones on pork, eggs, and chicken as well. I will see if I have a themoworks link, or maybe @kaleokahu does.
I know my chef pal works double to keep them separated, and that I see restaurants listed (local “dirty dining” articles) for having cooked next to raw (or under raw where things can drip)
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Definitely in the professional cooking World the emphasis is put on not storing raw Foods above cooked Foods. In the Freezer as well.
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