Woman sparks heated debate about food safety after sharing her one-pan Thanksgiving recipe

An influencer has sparked a heated conversation about food safety after she shared her one-pan Thanksgiving recipe. 

Kate Heintzelman, from Minnesota, has racked up more than 338,000 followers by sharing her cooking tips on Instagram.

But she left many people scratching their heads after she revealed the ‘lifesaving’ hack that is going to save her time while preparing her Thanksgiving meal in an Instagram video posted last week.

The food guru explained that she is planning to cook the meat and all of the side dishes together in one enormous tray – but her method did not go down well with some of her followers.

Many people slammed her technique in the comment section, claiming that it would put her guests at risk of food poisoning.

In the now-viral video, Kate was seen placing a raw and unwashed chicken inside an aluminum pan.

She then prepared a slew of popular Thanksgiving sides like sweet potatoes, green bean casserole, corn, and mashed potatoes around it in the same dish.

After that, the social media star drizzled the bird in oil and placed butter all throughout the pan.

The video then cut to the finished product, which showed the bird browned and roasted and the various side dishes all cooked. 

She did not specify how long she baked it for or at what temperature. 

‘One-pan Thanksgiving dinner is a lifesaver,’ she captioned the clip, which was viewed more than seven million times. 

But it was met with fierce criticism, with one user slamming Kate for failing to season the food properly and another claiming that the raw meat ‘contaminated’ the other products.

‘It’s giving food poisoning,’ one person scathed in the comment section.

‘What in the thousand ways to die is this?’ asked someone else.

‘Call the police,’ joked another user.

A fourth said, ‘Nasty. You didn’t clean the [chicken] or season it properly.’ 

‘This is downright nasty,’ agreed a different person.

‘Salmonella has entered the chat,’ someone else wrote.

While speaking to the New York Post about the backlash, Kate insisted that it was completely safe.

‘So you can’t put chicken with anything then? You put a roast in a crockpot with potatoes,’ she fired back to her haters. 

‘You’re telling me you cannot eat the potatoes because they at one point touched the raw meat? That doesn’t make any sense to me.

‘You could have 100 people telling you you need to rinse off your chicken. Then, if you rinse off your chicken, people are like, “Why are you rinsing off your chicken?”‘

The cooking expert stuck by her one-pan recipe, and insisted that the food all came out ‘great’ and that she’s still going to use it on Thanksgiving this week.

‘I want a whole Thanksgiving dinner and if it’s just going to be me and two or three other people, and it’s 100 pans to make of things… I was like, “What if we just throw it all in one pan?”‘ she explained.

‘The potatoes were a little burnt, but everything else turned out great.’