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coraa(More on sous vide, including an Interesting Link, and Science.)
I found the following site while googling around for sous vide information:
A Practical Guide to Sous Vide Cooking
...which helped me to understand the food safety implications. Basically, if this guy is correct (and he does cite/list sources, which makes me feel more confident about it), the reason it's safe to eat chicken sous vide-ed to 146F, even though the FDA recommends chicken be cooked to 160F, is that cooking for a long time at a lower temperature can just as effectively kill the bacteria etc. as cooking for a short time at a high temperature. I guess it's the same as milk pasteurization: milk can be either flash-pasteurized at a high temperature, or slowly pasteurized at a low temperature.
Interesting.
(Look! Fancy pasteurization tables that calculate for you the minimum length of time at a given temperature for a given thickness! Graphs! Equations! References! Science!)
In fact, it looks like I could have cooked my chicken at an even lower temperature (down to 136F, theoretically) and still been safe according to the pasteurization tables. I may experiment with that. ...Although, to be extra careful, I'd probably wait to do that with farmer's market chicken from a vendor I trust, because small-operation chickens tend to have a lower likelihood of salmonella anyway.
I found the following site while googling around for sous vide information:
A Practical Guide to Sous Vide Cooking
...which helped me to understand the food safety implications. Basically, if this guy is correct (and he does cite/list sources, which makes me feel more confident about it), the reason it's safe to eat chicken sous vide-ed to 146F, even though the FDA recommends chicken be cooked to 160F, is that cooking for a long time at a lower temperature can just as effectively kill the bacteria etc. as cooking for a short time at a high temperature. I guess it's the same as milk pasteurization: milk can be either flash-pasteurized at a high temperature, or slowly pasteurized at a low temperature.
Interesting.
(Look! Fancy pasteurization tables that calculate for you the minimum length of time at a given temperature for a given thickness! Graphs! Equations! References! Science!)
In fact, it looks like I could have cooked my chicken at an even lower temperature (down to 136F, theoretically) and still been safe according to the pasteurization tables. I may experiment with that. ...Although, to be extra careful, I'd probably wait to do that with farmer's market chicken from a vendor I trust, because small-operation chickens tend to have a lower likelihood of salmonella anyway.
