Curious about sources for this. I see some indication that botulism toxin can be destroyed by cooking, though the bar is pretty high - needs to be boiled over 5 minutes. So lesser temperature methods such as grilling the meat may not be sufficient, but something like stewing over many hours seems like would work fine.

I'm not gonna have a peer reviewed journal article for you or anything. I learned this in the food safety class you have to go through before managing a kitchen in a lot of jurisdictions.

> stewing over many hours seems like would work fine.

It won't! Good luck with it though.

Well I get that would make sense in that kind of environment. Best way to not hurt your customers is to never even risk it - why would you?

But my agenda is more selfish. I like to cold-smoke meats for adding to stews, based on the knowledge that stewing in > 85'C [1] water will destroy the botulism toxin. I could just stay away from cold-smoked meats to be safe; but then I would lose out on some of the tastiest food ever :-)

It can be a confusing topic because there are 3 different things to worry about: the active bacteria, the spores, and the toxin. Of the 3, the spores are the most resistant to heat, and according to the WHO link [1] can survive multiple hours in boiling water. However the toxin seems relatively unstable.

I really need to track down their sources though.

[1] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/botulism

Boiling for 10 minutes would be better. Pressure Cooking would be best as it can reach the heat/pressure needed to destroy the botulism spores too.

Here's an example with Staph food poisoning[1]. The bacteria dies when you cook it, but the enterotoxins that Staph generates aren't broken down by heat and remain (section 4). It's good to not consume live Staph, but contaminated food can still cause issues despite cooking.

[1]https://www.hindawi.com/journals/bmri/2014/827965/

USDA indicates that boiling for 10 minutes can prevent botulism: https://www.fsis.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media_file/202...

Although the boiling doesn't destroy the toxin itself, only the bacterial spores.

> Although the boiling doesn't destroy the toxin itself, only the bacterial spores.

The other way around