Repeat after me: it’s never just temperature.
Government agencies have always presented the idea of food safety in a simplified way. You’ve probably seen the chart: 165ºF for chicken, 145ºF for steaks, and so on.
Those temps are the “instant death” numbers for salmonella.
But they’re also overkill.
They’re intended for worst-case food-handling scenarios and the least competent food preparers.
Unfortunately, chicken breast cooked to 165ºF will be dry and desperately seeking gravy.
While chicken breast cooked to 150ºF (using SafeCook™) will be fork-tender, moist, slightly pink - and every bit as safe! No gravy required.
And steaks can be safely cooked as low as a very medium-rare 130°F.
Oversimplified rules lead to overcooked food.
SafeCook automatically factors in time and temperature.
SafeCook uses “integrated” AKA “cumulative” bacterial destruction to determine food safety.
It adds up the body count of bacteria at every step in the cooking process.
This is the same method commercial food preparers use. But with SafeCook, the Predictive Thermometer does all the math.
Here’s exactly how it works:
- Bacteria start dying at a certain temp (130-135ºF, depending on the type of food).
- The population of bacteria dies incrementally, based on time at temperature
- Given each increment of temp + time, 90% of the population dies (think of each bacterium rolling a d20 save and they need a 19 or 20 to survive!)
- Repeat this process with more increments of time + temp
- Every increment lowers the possible number of survivors by 90%
- Eventually the death rate will reach 99.99999%**
- Meaning about 1 in ten million bacteria are left alive (could be less)
- That’s when your food (chicken in this example) is considered “safe” by the USDA!
For example, chicken will almost always meet the safety standard within 30 seconds after reaching 150ºF.
That’s because the vast majority of bacteria already died in the time it took for the temp to rise from 130ºF to 150ºF!
