Pork must be cooked all the way through, whatever the cut.
Requirement — Food safety (microbiological)
Pork must be cooked all the way through, whatever the cut.
Target: 70°C in the thickest part, or an equivalent from the table below.
How to tell, without a thermometer
- No pink meat, including next to the bone on a bone-in chop
- Juices run clear when the thickest part is pierced
- Steaming hot through to the middle
If it has not got there: Give it two or three more minutes and check again in the thickest part, keeping the probe clear of the bone — bone conducts heat differently and will read higher than the meat beside it.
| Temperature | Held for | Measured at |
|---|---|---|
| 70°C | 2 min | the thickest part, away from the bone |
| 75°C | 30 sec | the thickest part, away from the bone |
Why this is the rule
Pork is named by the FSA in the same breath as poultry and minced meat: a food that needs to be cooked all the way through, not a food where a rare centre is a stylistic choice. This differs from current practice in several other countries, where pork is increasingly served slightly pink on the strength of falling Trichinella prevalence, and a reader who has eaten pink pork abroad or seen it on television deserves to know that UK guidance has not moved with it. In an air fryer the specific risk is a thick bone-in chop, where the meat next to the bone is the last to reach temperature and is exactly where nobody puts the thermometer.
This outranks any cooking time on this site. Where a cooking recommendation cannot be reconciled with a rule like this one, AirfryerHQ does not publish the recommendation — not with a warning attached, not greyed out, not at all.
Evidence and confidence
- Applies to
- Specific to this food
- Why this rating
- Directly stated in the authority's own list. The rule was missing from Sprint 1 entirely and was added on reading the source rather than on anybody noticing the gap.
- Last reviewed
- 2026-08-13
What this does not cover
- The FSA names pork as requiring thorough cooking and does not publish a pork-specific temperature. The pairs here are the general ones from the same document, applied to this food — which is what the authority's own framing supports and no more.
- Says nothing about cured pork products such as bacon and ham, which are a different question.
Sources (1)
Food Standards Agency — UK food-safety authority (United Kingdom (England, Wales and Northern Ireland))
Relied on for: That pork is among the foods requiring thorough cooking, and the published time-and-temperature pairs the target is expressed with.
States this directly
Passage read and verified
Retrieved 2026-08-13 from gov.uk