Sous Vide Food Safety: please save me!

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Hi all. New Anova owner here, loving the experimentation and most of my results so far. Huge ChefSteps fan. I have the giant MC book collection and my head is spinning on food safety. MC has complete charts with recommended temps for ideal food flavor (ie SV temps). They also point out that these temps are typically at odds with the food safety temps.

I'm trying to decipher the difference between the relatively low risk of getting sick from 'undercooked' food (which I'm not that worried about) and the more serious risks from low temp cooking / low oxygen environments (ie vacuum bags).

I know this is a complicated topic, but is there anyone that can write a few non-scientific tips that might help keep me and people like me from killing our loved ones?

Brendan_Lee_56950

Undercooked is a relative term. Food safety guidelines from the government are designed to be very conservative because they don't want to expose people to any possible risk at any level. For the most part you will be working above 140F in most applications and this means that your biggest enemy then becomes surface bacteria for long cooks of big cuts. As Johan pointed out in a separate post, the time to cook a large cut to core temp usually surpasses pasteurization times and negates most of the risk that temperature would provide.