Sous Vide & the size of protein

Alex_36374

I'm looking to Sous Vide a whole chicken ( saw the recipe for "whole poached chicken"). I have a few questions. First, my understanding is that Sous Vide is safe up until certain sizes - e.g. according to Douglas Baldwin, nothing over 3" thick. I assume it's because the core temp stays in the "danger zone" for too long. By this line of thinking, one would assume that a whole chicken isn't safe for Sous Vide applications. The "whole poached chicken" recipe calls for a liquid to poach in the bag; aside from flavor development, does this help achieve safer cooking? And is it necessary. In short, can I sous vide an entire chicken without any liquid in the bag/pouch? Is it safe?

Thanks!! Aldoogie

Matt_67991

I will say that Chefsteps cooked a forequarter of pastrami, and Heston did a whole pig so that rule is probably overly cautious.

But for the poached chicken recipe, the liquid inside of the bag would pretty quickly reach approximate thermal equilibrium with the the bath, and would cook the chicken from the inside of the cavity as well as the outside. Because it cooks from the inside, it would be fine to model the heat transfer as a spatchcocked chicken, which doesn't exceed 3" of thickness at any point.

As for doing it without liquid, the inside of the cavity would have heat transferred to it less efficiently, and there might be some risks associated with that. The cooking environment would still be moist though, so I wouldn't see an advantage in using no liquid.