Reheating chicken in itself isn't dangerous, but you do need to understand FULLY what you're doing and where the chicken's come from and where it's been.

Just follow these simple rules and reheating your chicken won't make you ill:

• Starting with the chicken the first time round, make sure you don't leave it out - chill the chicken as soon as possible, keeping it covered.

• Ideally split down the cooked chicken as soon as you can and get it into the fridge. Even though it's still warm, it'll be OK to put it into the fridge so long as it's not close to anything else that it could warm up - so give it a lot of space until it's fully chilled. Usually I would cover the chicken straight after it's been served (possibly with some foil), then I'd ensure the leftovers were in the fridge and chilling within an hour, officially you have 1½ hours from cooking it to chilling it, but I like to play double safe.

• Do not allow the chicken to become contaminated by any uncooked/raw meat you also have in your fridge. Cooked meats should always be stored separately from raw meats, so ensure anything in your fridge is always covered well and wipe any splashes down immediately. If possible, keep raw meats on a shelf lower than cooked meats - this is because cooking will kill any bacteria present in raw meat, so if cooked meat drips onto raw meat it doesn't matter as the raw meat will be cooked, but if it's the other way round then you could be directly contaminating the cooked meat. If you always store meats in a covered container this lessens any risk.

• Ensure you reheat the chicken thoroughly. It should be piping hot throughout. Piping hot means at least 75°C/165°F all the way through. So I'd make sure it had been reheated at this temperature for at least two minutes.

• Only re-heat the chicken once. Once your chicken has been cooked once, you should only re-heat it once more and eat it straight away. If you've bought a ready-cooked chicken and already heated it up, then this is where you start to stray into the unknown territory. If you bought the chicken raw, or frozen/raw, and have cooked it yourself once, then it's safe to keep and reheat the leftovers.

So, the essential things to remember when reheating chicken are:

• Chill it quickly, get it into the fridge soonest
• Reheat it THOROUGHLY
• Only ever reheat chicken ONCE

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Images by:Roast Chicken: Herman_Saksono