expiration time on sous vide

Jarne_333336

Hi!

My name is Jarne and I am working for a company in Norway that also delivers catering. We are currently looking in to the possibility of supplying institutions with dinner and sous vide will be the best method. However they demand expiration dates to be 9+ days. Are there any research done on this we can refer to? How will it affect the expiration if we process the food after it’s vacuumed compared to before?

Hope for a quick reply as deadline is mid- next week.

Kindest regards,

Jarne

Brandon_Byrd_40557

Doug Baldwin's website has a ton of great information on sous vide cooking, food safety, and pasteurization. Best practices are to process the food, vacuum seal it, and cook it until it has been pasteurized. Rapid chilling after the cook step is also necessary. If you process food after it's been cooked, you will be exposing it to pathogens and it will no longer be pasteurized.

A key thing to consider is that proteins cook at much lower temperatures than vegetable material (which requires much higher temps, around 85C, in order to soften). For that reason, it's not advisable to cook vegetables in the same bag as proteins. They must either be cooked first and sealed with the raw protein prior to cooking, or else kept completely separate. My preference is to cook, and store vegetables separately from any proteins.

I'll also add that proteins cooked sous vide often have an unappealing appearance straight out of the bag (and the bag juices can be somewhat gross too). To overcome this, you may want to seal, cook, and chill larger portions of protein, then unbag them, portion, dry them off, sear them, chill again, rebag, and pasteurize one final time before chilling for storage. This is a cumbersome workflow, but necessary for producing "heat and eat" portions that require little time and attention at the time of service.