Author: Janby Admin

Sous Vide offers many advantages over traditional cooking methods. However, some people may be wondering if it is any safer than these other food preparation methods. The answer is yes.

Let’s examine some of the ways Sous Vide outshines traditional stovetop, grill, and oven cooking in the safety department.

1. Killing Pathogenic Bacteria

Sous Vide is a useful cooking process because it ensures the food in vacuum sealed bags is cooked evenly. When fully submerged, heat is distributed across the food surface, which allows it to gradually approach the desired internal temperature during retherming.

This kills off any pathogenic bacteria inside the ingredients and makes the food safe to serve. Such pathogenic bacteria can be a problem in traditional stovetop cooking because there is no guarantee the food is being cooked evenly or that it has approached a safe internal temperature.

2. No Fire Hazard

Sous Vide circulators are electric and heat up water using a simple heating element. This heating element doesn’t pose the fire risk that an open flame on a stovetop poses.

Open flames can cause burns or set surrounding fabrics on fire, so a flameless food preparation method is especially useful for restaurant kitchens that are concerned about fire damage.

3. Limited Burn Injury Potential

The Sous Vide cooking method stands out because it uses relatively low cooking temperatures. The water in a typical Sous Vide setup varies between 120°F (48.9°C) and 185°F (85°C) throughout the food preparation process.

This hot water may injure a chef or line worker if they accidentally come into contact with it. However, the extent of the injury is likely to be minor when compared with stovetops and ovens, which reach much higher temperatures.

How JANBY Track Can Help With Sous Vide

Janby Track can help make your kitchen operations safer by allowing you to monitor Sous Vide operations remotely. Please contact us to learn more about Janby Track and the various safety features it offers.

Businesses in the hospitality industry often deal with food and beverage (F&B) challenges on an ongoing basis. Many of these businesses have utilized Sous Vide automation to navigate around such problems. Here are some key ways Sous Vide automation has been useful.

1. Staff Shortages

Staff Shortages can be an ongoing problem in the hospitality industry. Most restaurants find it difficult to hire part-time staff to cover shifts when there is a sudden influx of customers. This staff shortage leaves restaurants in a difficult positions where they are unable to meet suden rise in demand.

As an answer to this problem, restaurants can work around by purchasing pre prepared sous vide food from specialised food vendors. They can then automate the sous vide process using a platform such as the Janby Track. This allows chefs to track Sous Vide cook times and temperature using the built-in QR system without having to rely on additional staff.

2. Heightened Sanitation Guidelines

Food health and safety regulations have become stricter in recent years with regards to sanitation. Such regulations place additional pressure on restaurants because they require more care during the food preparation process.

As a solution to this, many restaurants have adopted the Sous Vide cooking process and optimized it with automation. This automated system ensures that food being prepared or rethermed via Sous Vide has reached a safe internal temperature before being removed from the water tank.

3. Waste from food expiration

Restaurants often deal with large amounts of food waste when ingredients expire. Such wastage generally occurs because it is difficult for staff to keep track of expiration dates for individual ingredients or because they are not aware of the consumption patterns of their establishment.

Sous Vide food items generally last longer in storage compared to other food items thanks to their vacuum seal. This means there is less likely to be wastage when restaurants adopt Sous Vide cooking in their operations.

You can learn more about JANBY Track and the ways it can help your kitchen operations.

Low temperature cooking is an extended cooking technique worldwide and, in this post, we are going to explain the heating process when using immersion circulators for low temp retherming.

What is low temp cooking?

As its name indicates, it consists of applying temperatures lower than the boiling point, which are also considered ¨dangerous¨. There are some tables that explain the relation between time and temperature to achieve pasteurization and consequently a safe output, we covered this topic on another post:

Low temp cooking is generally used together with vacuum sealed products; however, this is no mandatory (for instance, low temp eggs do no require to be vacuum sealed). When combining low temp and vacuum, we call it sous-vide cooking.

Some benefits of low temp cooking

Food tenderness, flavor concentration and the safeness of the product due to pasteurization are really praised characteristics of this technique.

In fact, food tenderness and pasteurization are directly linked to the time and temperature in which a protein is cooked. This means that to do low temp right a precise control of this two variables time and temperature is crucial.

The heating process when sous vide cooking

Any heating process involves energy transfers from the hot source to the cold source. There are 3 different heat transfer mechanisms in nature: conduction, convection, and radiation.

In the heating process of sous vide vacuum sealed proteins only 2 apply: conduction and convection. Conduction, mainly inside the bag. This is how the energy is transferred from the surface of the protein to the core. Convection, when water or air is flowing around the bag. In any case the higher the temperature gap between the cold and the hot parts, the faster the energy transfer.

Low temp cooking implies a small gap between the hot and the cold part, meaning that the heat transfer speed is low, which could be considered a disadvantage.

Equipment for low temp cooking: immersion circulators

Generally speaking, immersion circulators are the preferred choice to apply this technique for 2 main reasons:

1. Water heat exchange rates are superior to those of air (ovens).
2. The water temperature control is relatively simple with this type of equipment.

How do immersion circulators work?

After many testing in our lab, it is very clear there is a common pattern when retherming products in a water tank using immersion circulators. In order to introduce this pattern and the different phases we can find on it; we’ll use real data gathered during one of those real-life testing.

In the following graph we see that the target temperature for the probe was 160F, while the water temperature was set to 165F. It took 50 minutes to hit the target temperature.

This specific graph was obtained while retherming chicken breast in a Sammic  XL+120P immersion circulator. It was a batch of 30 individually packaged chicken breast, all of them put in bulk-mode in the same basket. That is, there was not any positioning of the bags to improve the water flow. The probe was measuring the internal temperature of one of the bags in the middle of the basket (worst case scenario).

NOTE: all values are taken from that testing and therefore cannot be applied or make extensive to other proteins or cooking conditions. However, as we said earlier, the patterns that we see, indeed, are found in any immersion+low-temp cooking cycle.

Now, let’s have a deeper look to this graph. First thing to notice, is that the heating is not a linear process. It took 13 minutes to increase the temperature from 53F to 107F, but then, another 33 minutes were needed to go from 107F to 160F. So, is fast at the beginning and it slows down at the end.

If we calculate the heating speed measured as Temperature increase per minute throughout the cycle, we get the following graph:

(As we are using a core probe, there is a lag until energy starts to arrive to the core). In less than 5 minutes, we hit the maximum heating speed that is around 5/6 F per minute in this cycle. This speed is kept for some minutes but quickly starts to slow down. At the end, the speed is very slow (0.2/0.4 F per minute).

To better understand the reason why this happens, we’ll use the next graph where we have calculated the heating speed as compared to the gap between the water temperature and the target temperature for the probe. As you can see below, there is a similar lag for heating speed to increase at the beginning of the cycle. But then, we can see that the speed remains high while the gap is high and starts to decrease when the gap drops below 60F. Interestingly, the decrease is linear with the temperature gap.

What can we learn from this pattern?

• As the heating speed is not linear, it’s not that if we increase the gap to bridge by 10% we are increasing the time by 10%. So, in our testing, if we had to heat to 150 instead of 160, it would take roughly two minutes less, given we adjust the water temperature to 155F (+5 over the core temp target).
• At the same time, if we increase the water temperature to have a bigger gap between the core temperature target and the water, this will expedite the whole process. This is what makes DeltaT so popular when cooking low temp. Indeed, setting the water temp to the same value we want to achieve for the core temperature would make the cycle to take extremely long. Needless to say, if there is not a proper time control and we set a very high deltaT, there is a risk to overcook the protein.
• The actual nature of low temperature cooking/retherming is helping us to have safe cooking processes. Let’s see why.

Following the Time-Temperature Combination for different proteins that the FSIS has made available to all of us in FSIS Cooking Guideline for Meat and Poultry Products (Revised Appendix A) (usda.gov), we know that there are multiple combinations of Time and Temperature that can achieve a proper pasteurization of the protein.

We have included the table below for the chicken protein. We can learn from there that to pasteurize at 160F it takes 17 seg.

If multiple bags are put in a water tank at the same time all of them will have a similar behavior, but not necessarily exactly the same. Small differences may happen depending on the actual size/thickness of each portion and the location of the bag. If we have a higher water flow surrounding some bags, we will expedite the heating process of those.

Going back to what we learned in our experiment, we saw that the bigger the gap the faster the process. This means that those bags that for whatever reason are faster at the beginning, will slow down first while the rest will keep heating at a higher pace. And will not slow down until their gap is small.

Picking the value for 150F(10F less than our target) from the FSIS table, we see that to achieve pasteurization we need to keep that temperature for 4.2 minutes. The core probe hit 150 after 33 minutes, that is 17 minutes before the cycle ended. It would have been enough to keep it there or above for 4.2min, but we kept it another 17min. This means that we don’t need to have an ultra-precise water flow or portioning to achieve pasteurization among all the bags of a batch as the real nature of the low-temp cooking/retherming process will help us.

What is deltaT in sous vide cooking?

DeltaT refers to the gap between the water temperature and the target temperature for the probe. This should not be too big for two reasons. One mentioned before has to do with getting the right tenderness. Second, it may expedite the process to such extent that small variances regarding the portioning or the exact location of the core probe cannot be overriden.

Finally, we have calculated when we achieved different combinations from the FSIS table for chicken. You’ll find the data below.

Probe Temp (F)	Time since Cycle started (min)	Hold time to pasteurize	Time to Pasteurization (min)
145	28,70	13,0	41,70
146	29,38	10,6	39,98
147	30,23	8,6	38,83
148	31,22	6,8	38,02
149	31,98	5,4	37,38
150	33,05	4,2	37,25
151	33,97	3,1	37,07
152	35,23	2,3	37,53
153	36,20	1,6	37,80
* Cooking cycle ended after 50,05 minutes

For the FSIS, the protein was pasteurized after 37 minutes. It reached at 151F in 33.97 minutes and was kept there for 3.1 min. But the cycle did not finish till 13 minutes later. More than enough to absorb any small variation regarding positioning or thickness of the portion.

What is the HACCP control?

The HACCP system refers to the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points of the different processes in the food industry. It is characterized by its preventive approach to food-related hazards rather than a reactive approach.

Ultimately, the HACCP system makes it possible to identify hazards and take measures to control them in order to ensure food safety.

Origin of HACCP control

The origin of HACCP controls comes from the aeronautical industry, when during the first space programs it was established as a microbiological safety control. Previously, all quality control systems were based on the analysis of the final product, with a clearly reactive focus on possible problems.

It was not until the mid 80’s those different institutions such as WHO, ICMSF, NAS, NACMCF promoted its application in the food industry.

The 7 principles of HACCP control

HACCP control is based on 7 fundamental principles:

PRINCIPLE 1: Conduct a hazard analysis.

PRINCIPLE 2: Determine the critical control points (CCP).

PRINCIPLE 3: Establish a critical limit(s).

PRINCIPLE 4: Establish a monitoring system to control the critical control points.

PRINCIPLE 5: Establish corrective actions to be taken when monitoring indicates that a particular CCP is not under control.

PRINCIPLE 6: Establish testing procedures to confirm that the HACCP system is working effectively.

PTINCIPLE 7: Establish a system of documentation of all procedures and records appropriate to these principles and their application.

How to develop a HACCP plan?

To develop a HACCP plan, 12 tasks must be differentiated based on the 7 principles previously mentioned.

Step 1: Establish a HACCP team

The first activity will be to establish the scope of the study to be carried out, which will allow the team to be set up as closely as possible to the needs. This team should be composed of people from different disciplines within the organization to better identify all the critical control points.

• On the one hand, a manager or team leader should be established to convene the group and direct its activities to ensure the correct implementation of the concept.

• There must also be a specialist in the product to be analyzed and the processes it follows. This will be the person in charge of designing the product flow diagrams.

• Several specialists who are familiar with certain hazards and risks related to quality controls.

• There will be a technical operator in charge of compiling the progress and conclusions throughout the different steps taken to draw up the plan.

• Additionally, the people involved in the different processes being analyzed can be incorporated at different points in the process.

Step 2: Describe the product to be analyzed

First it is important to identify and delimit the product to be analyzed. There is a specific form to carry out this task. Information about the safety of the product, packaging method, storage, transport, shelf life and recommended storage temperatures should be included. All this information should be included on the product label.

Step 3: Determine intended use of the product

The intended use of a product will directly influence the risks to which it will be exposed.  On the one hand, it will be necessary to identify whether the product will be subjected to any processing or cooking prior to consumption, as well as the characteristics of the end consumer and whether he/she is in a position of vulnerability. Finally, the possibility of improper use of the product must be identified.

Step 4: Preparing the product flow diagram

This phase should be led by the product specialist, usually a quality control manager or process engineer. This diagram will be specific to each plant and will have annotations for each different plant.

Step 5: Confirmation of the diagram on site

Once the Product Flow Diagram has been identified and designed, the other members of the team should go to the production site and check the different sections phase by phase.

Step 6: Hazard identification and analysis

• Hazard identification: In this step, all hazards, whether actual or potential, that may occur in the ingredients or stages of the product system are identified.

Generally, food safety hazards are classified into the following 3 types:

1.  Biological: usually foodborne pathogenic bacteria such as Salmonella, Listeria and E. coli.

2.  Chemical: these can be of natural origin, produced by microorganisms or chemical substances added by humans such as fungicides or insecticides.

3. Physical: those contaminating elements such as insects, stones or metallic fragments.

• Hazard analysis

The probability of a hazard occurring is called risk. Each probability or risk is assigned a value according to the degree of certainty as to whether it will occur. Once the probability has been established, an analysis is made of how much risk this hazard poses to people or animals. Those hazards that are finally determined as inadmissible will be transferred to the Critical Control Points.

Finally, once the hazards have been identified, control measures must be worked out. These control measures will be oriented to reduce the risks.

Step 7: Establish Critical Control Points (CCP)

In this step, the hazards previously identified in step 6 are analyzed to determine whether control measures are in place and whether they can adequately control the hazard.

If it is established that there are no adequate control measures, production of the food will be suspended until these are defined and implemented.

Step 8: Establish critical limits for each CCP

Critical limits can respond to different measurement criteria, such as temperature, moisture content, exposure time, pH, water activity or appearance. These measurement criteria should have established allowable levels or limits.

Step 9: Establish a surveillance procedure

By surveillance we mean the monitoring of critical control limits to ensure compliance. This surveillance should be rapid and should enable prompt corrective action to be taken.

The most common surveillance procedures refer to time, temperature and moisture content.

Step 10: Establish corrective actions

Corrective measures should be established for the most unfavorable cases. These corrective actions should be established considering the end use of the product, hazards, risks and their severity.

Step 11: Verify HACCP plan

Once the plan has been established, it is necessary to verify and validate that all hazards, limits, and corrective measures have been correctly established.

This can be done in several ways:

1. To order an external audit
2. Analyze samples of the product with methods other than those established.
3. Periodic observations of Critical Control Point operations.

Step 12: Record keeping

Finally, we have the task of record keeping. This is a very important point since it allows to follow up the processes followed by the product, leaving a record of compliance with the critical limits.

How to carry out controls in the JANBY Track?

The Janby Track is a system that digitalizes and automates the cooking process as well as the Sous Vide regeneration process. In addition, it has a wide range of options and configurations that allow the user to set alarms and alerts that meet the control needs of each organization.

Label generation and the option of discarding batches

On the one hand, responding to principle 1 of HACCP control and to task 2 of describing the product, you have the option of generating product labels with all the necessary information using the Janby Cloud, as well as discarding batches that do not comply with regulations with a single click.

Activity logs in the Cloud

In relation to the last step of the HACCP plan on record keeping, all movements and actions that occur throughout the service are automatically recorded, as well as the time at which it was cooked, for how long, at what temperature the water was and the temperature of the probe in case it was used.

Additionally, with the option of connecting the Janby Track to the order system, we would have information of who has been the final customer of that product.

Active controls during processing

In relation to task 9 of establishing monitoring tasks for critical control points, active controls are additional parameters that can be established for each product or recipe in case they require further monitoring.

Additional controls can be set for water temperatures, probe temperatures, intermediate warnings during processing or pasteurization of a product.

Process controls during processing

Similarly, process controls refer to controls that are set to limit or enable actions when using the system. These may refer to product reuse, durations of warnings or permissions when extracting a product from water.

In short, HACCP is a preventive plan that aims to ensure the safety of food that is made available for human consumption. And in the case of low-temperature sous-vide cooking, Janby has developed a system that makes it possible to apply the different criteria for greater control.