Sous-vide

Sous-vide pasteurization basics: how time–temperature tables make "low and slow" safe

Nov 16, 2026 · ~6 min read

Sous-vide looks like it breaks every rule on this site: chicken held at 140 °F (60 °C)? A "medium-rare" burger bath at 130 °F (54.4 °C)? It doesn't break the rules — it uses a different, official one. Food safety is determined by temperature and time, and USDA FSIS publishes exactly those tables for industry cooks. This page explains the principle, cites the official documents, and explains what we deliberately do not republish.

Key takeaways

Pasteurization is time-at-temperature: lower temps are lethal if held long enough — the principle behind FSIS's official tables.
The official document is FSIS's Cooking Guideline for Meat and Poultry Products (revised "Appendix A", December 2021), with time–temperature lethality tables for poultry, beef and pork.
The UK FSA publishes a consumer version of the same idea: 70 °C for 2 minutes at the centre, or listed equivalents (60 °C/45 min … 80 °C/6 s).
TempChart does not reprint specific sous-vide hold times beyond official consumer tables — read the FSIS guideline directly for process values.

The principle: lethality is an equation, not a number

The home-cook chart gives one number per food because a thermometer reading is a single instant: 165 °F (73.9 °C) in chicken kills salmonella essentially immediately, so no timing is needed. But bacteria die at lower temperatures too — just more slowly. Hold the same chicken at 150 °F (65.6 °C) for the right number of minutes and the cumulative kill is equivalent; hold it lower still and the required time stretches toward an hour or more. This is the same logic as the UK FSA's published consumer table — 60 °C for 45 minutes, 65 °C for 10 minutes, 70 °C for 2 minutes, 75 °C for 30 seconds, 80 °C for 6 seconds — scaled into industrial precision by USDA. It is also the deep logic of the 3-minute rest rule: temperature and time jointly deliver safety.

The official documents, cited precisely

What sous-vide cooks call "the Appendix A tables" is, in current form, the FSIS guideline "Cooking Guideline for Meat and Poultry Products Including Juvenile Hens, Beef Patties, and Fully Cooked Ground Beef and Pork Products" (FSIS Guideline 2021-0014, December 2021), which revised and replaced the classic 1999 Appendix A lethality tables. It publishes time–temperature combinations achieving defined log reductions of Salmonella (and addresses other pathogens), with separate tables for poultry and for meat, plus the humidity and measurement conditions that make the numbers valid. Two caveats TempChart insists on: the tables were written for inspected establishments, not home kitchens; and they assume controlled, measured holding conditions with calibrated equipment — a home circulator's dial is not that. Home sous-vide practice borrows the principle, but the official home-cook chart remains the single-temperature one in our master chart.

What we verify, what we won't reprint

TempChart's rule is official numbers only, transcribed exactly — so we take the conservative path here. The FSA consumer equivalents are printed verbatim in the table above because the FSA publishes them for consumers. The FSIS lethality tables, by contrast, are industrial process tables whose values depend on product type, thickness, humidity and target log reduction; lifting one cell ("X minutes at Y °F") without that apparatus would be exactly the kind of decontextualized number this site refuses to publish. For process values, read the FSIS guideline directly — it is public and downloadable from fsis.usda.gov (search "FSIS Guideline 2021-0014"). If a food-safety question involves serving immunocompromised people, default to the plain chart numbers instead.

Practical sous-vide rules that ARE official

Time-bounded bathing: FSIS's bigger concern with long low-temperature holds is Clostridium perfringens and Bacillus cereus growth in food held in the 40–140 °F (4.4–60 °C) range — so baths are for cooking-and-pasteholding within bounded times, not all-day warm holding.
Chill fast: cook-chill sous-vide (batch cooking) requires rapid chilling through the danger zone — the same 2-hour logic as leftover cooling rules, with shallow containers or ice baths.
Sear after bath: the surface pasteurization argument only covers surfaces exposed to bath temperature; a post-bath sear is standard practice (and flavour).
Calibrate: a circulator a few degrees off invalidates a time-at-temperature plan silently — check it with the ice-point method (32 °F / 0 °C).

Where sous-vide meets the chart

Two common confusions cleared up. First, "my recipe says pull the steak at 130 °F (54.4 °C)": that is a quality/doneness preference, not a safe-temperature rule — the official US consumer standard for whole cuts is 145 °F (62.8 °C) plus rest, and time-at-temperature alternatives come from the process documents above. Second, pasteurized ≠ sterile: sous-vide pasteurization reduces pathogens by defined logs but the food still needs safe cooling and storage afterward. When you just need the standard number, the doneness lookup tool gives it with its source.

Educational reference, not a process authority

This page summarizes publicly available official guidance for home cooks. It is not a validated cooking process. Follow FSIS and FSA primary documents, equipment instructions, and your health authority — especially when cooking for at-risk people.