I see many people are unhappy with the loss of the ice bath feature on the new (crappy) app. I understand the concept of the ice bath but run into some issues in my head.
If I’m correct, you place your uncooked food into an ice bath to keep it below 40*F. Then remotely start the circulator and begin cooking.
Now all the SV recipes I’ve read and followed have you place the food in the water after it reaches temperature. One, for consistency, and two, to keep food from staying too long in the danger zone.
So if my chicken breast is at 40 (or below) and I set my device to 140F how long will my chicken be in the danger zone as the water heats up? My hot water out of the tap (110F-ish) takes 10-15 minutes to come up to temp. I imagine that starting with ice water would take at least an hour if not more. What if it’s a larger piece of meat that’s significantly thicker than a chicken breast? That core temp may be in the danger zone even longer.
Am I missing something? I’ve never used the ice bath feature and cant foresee ever needing it. But I sure would like to hear from y’all. When it comes to food safety you can never be too sure.
Thanks in advance
As everyone’s vessel size, the ratio of ice to water, whether the vessel is insulated, covered, ambient room temperature of the room the vessel is in - you get the idea - in order to use this feature reliably, you need to do some testing to see how quickly your vessel can come up to temperature (and keep the metrics the same to be reliable).
Unless your meat is a significant percentage of the volume of the vessel, it really shouldn’t affect how long it would take it to get from below 40F to target temperature.
Anomalii, you have a favourable understanding of the SV technique and i don’t think you are missing anything. I share your concern for the use of an ice bath to retard the start of a cook which is the reason i prefer advanced cooking in multiple meal batches.
For precise cooking of relatively thin food products we start cooking when the water temperature reaches the set point.
I wouldn’t use the SV technique for anything thicker than 3-inches. It just takes too long to achieve temperature equilibrium. Solid muscle large cuts of meat are relatively safe as only the external surfaces can become contaminated and they reach a safe temperature early in the cook. I always treat fabricated cut; - boned and rolled chuck roasts or boneless shoulder blade roasts, for example, as if they were contaminated. You definitely want them completely above 130ᴼF in 3 hours or less.
Food safety is always based on time and temperature.