I Did My 1st Sous Vide on a Pork Loin for Christmas

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Had not thought to try pork loin, but that makes sense. It is prone to drying out when cooked the ordinary way, so sous vide is a good technique for it.

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Believe me, it was succulent! Can't wait to try a sirloin.

I did a strip today that came out incredible

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Eta: How does chicken turn out sous vide? I really like this recipe but something writes me out about not cooking chicken to 165.

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Chicken is fantastic. The first time you have a properly cooked piece of chicken and you realize how juicy and succulent it can be, you'll be sad at all the dry chalky chicken you've eaten over the years.

Get those temperatures out of your head. FORGET THEM.

FORGET.

165F is the temperature required to instantly kill all but 1 pathogen in the food out of every 10,000,000, and is far above the temperature that results in the best taste and texture. Getting the chicken to 165 is a foolproof way to have fools avoid sickening themselves and also to make chicken terrible.

In reality, once you get food to 130F, you're beginning to pasteurize the food, at least in terms of the types of pathogens that can multiply fast enough during cooking to sicken you. Sous vide won't wipe out botulinum, but most cooking times are far too short to allow it to reproduce enough to get you sick and most cooking temps send it into a kind of dormant spore stage. So, unless you're doing a ten day cook or plan to leave it in the bag on the counter (remember, botulinum LOVES anaerobic conditions like the inside of our sous vide bags) for a while, you don't have to worry too much about botulism.

Now, the pasteurization that does happen that we want for killing things like salmonella is just going to take longer at the lower temperatures that you'll use to get the proper flavor and texture you want. The goal is still to reduce the number of bacteria and pathogens by the same amount as 165F will do instantly, though. The idea is to get the food to the proper temperature and just make sure that you hold it there for long enough to pasteurize it in the bag. Check out this webpage. It should explain everything nicely.

LINK

EDIT: Two minutes too slow, Jack.

Excellent read. Enjoyed the scientific approach for the explanation and testing cooking times vs texture. Funniest part to me was the food safety training/Applebee's reference. I was a line cook there throughout college and where the cooking temps and safe ranges were ingrained in me.

Thanks to both of you.

Excited to try this out. Will probably do the chicken on Saturday and ribeyes on Sunday for my father in law's birthday. I'll report back.

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I Did My 1st Sous Vide on a Pork Loin for Christmas

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Me too... actually four small ones, probably 6 pounds total. I cooked them for 3-4 hours at 140, finished in a skillet, came out amazing.