Nutrition & Foodservice Edge Magazine - May/June 2022 - 34

SOUS VIDE COOKING-GETTING
STARTED
will have a much shorter cooking time,
since the tissue doesn't need to be
broken down for quality purposes.
When considering the application of
sous vide, it is important to understand
that the cooking time for food safety
and food quality are not related.
Products such as salmon fillets or filet
mignon are cooked to the desired
temperature for a duration of time that
destroys bacteria. Items such as short
ribs will be cooked far longer than the
minimum cooking time designated
by food safety requirements in order
to slowly break down the connective
tissue and ensure food quality.
FOOD SAFETY AND HACCP
IMPLICATIONS
If you are going to sous vide in a
commercial kitchen, you are required
to have a HACCP (hazard analysis
critical control points) plan, and you
will need to fully educate your staff.
When you ask any food professional
the proper internal temperature for
chicken, the answer is generally 165
degrees F. This is partially true. The
second half of that equation is the
temperature is held for 15 seconds.
You can achieve the same level of
food safety by cooking chicken to
136 degrees F and holding it for 81.4
minutes (FSIS, 2021, p 37). This doesn't
mean that an establishment should
start serving rare to medium rare
chicken, even though it would be
perfectly safe to eat. The purpose of
sous vide poultry products is often
to serve as a par-cooking technique
that will save time. The USDA Food
Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS)
has published the required data to
create a simple and effective HACCP
plan for sous vide cooking. The time
and temperature charts are broken
IT IS VIRTUALLY
IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERCOOK
a product in a sous vide since the
temperature will never surpass
the setting and moisture is not
expelled from the product.
into three categories: meat products,
chicken, and turkey.
The guidelines for meat products
are straightforward. If you are
going to cook an item to a particular
temperature, it must hold that internal
temperature for a certain period of time
to achieve a desired level of lethality.
The general rule is that it takes a
product one hour per inch of thickness
to reach that internal temperature
if it is thawed at the time of cooking.
For example, a four inch roast would
take approximately four hours to
reach the set internal temperature
of the immersion circulator. This
data can be verified with an internal
Bluetooth thermometer for recordkeeping
purposes. If you only have a
34 NUTRITION & F OOD SER VICE EDGE | MAY-JUNE 2022
set number of temperatures that you
sous vide meat products to, this HACCP
plan is very simple to write. Take the
correlating time for each temperature
and document the process.
The data given by FSIS for poultry
is more problematic when writing a
HACCP plan. This is because turkey
and chicken are separated and there
are different cooking times for the
percentage of fat in the product being
used. In order to simplify this process,
basic procedures can be followed that
will cause negligible, if any, reduction
in quality. It is virtually impossible to
overcook a product in a sous vide since
the temperature will never surpass the
setting and moisture is not expelled
from the product due to the low
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