Safety

Appears in
top 1000Under Pressure: Cooking Sous Vide
Under Pressure

By Thomas Keller

Published 2008

  • About
The safety issues of concern in cooking sous vide are different from those cooks are used to addressing in more conventional forms of cooking. They’re not complicated, but they’re very important to understand and respect; if we ignore them, the potential pathogens can be considerably more dangerous than in other situations because of their opportunity to multiply to dangerous levels.

The bacteria we’re mainly concerned with in sous vide cooking are Salmonella, Clostridium botulinum, E. coli O157:H7, and Listeria. All of these bacteria can live in the anaerobic environment of a vacuum-packed bag, and if they do exist in the bag and it is put in warm water, they can multiply to dangerous levels. The longer bacteria are in what is referred to as the “danger zone”—temperatures between 4.4° and 60°C (40° and 140°F)—the faster they multiply and the more dangerous they become. Bacteria grow with exceptional speed at temperatures between about 40° and 50°C (100° and 120°F), doubling in number every 20 to 30 minutes.