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microbiologist who advises us. After consulting with her, here is what we have learned:
USDA recommended temperatures are simplified down to a single number to make it easy for average consumers to understand. At those temperatures the meat is considered pasteurized almost instantly. What they don't tell you is that you can also pasteurize food at temperatures below their recommendations by cooking it longer.
 Cook sous vide at 131°F or higher. At lower temperatures you may
 not be killing all pathogens. You may be incubating them!
 That’s because, in the real world, pasteurization of meat is not just
 a matter of temperature. It is a balance of all four of these
 variables taken together:
 1. Temperature.
 2. Time.
 3. Load (how many bugs are there to start with).
 4. Kill rate (how many remaining bugs are too few to worry
 about).
According to well publicized USDA info, you can pasteurize chicken or turkey instantly when the internal temperature hits 165°F. But according to USDA research that is not well publicized, it takes 27 seconds at 160°F, 5 minutes at 150°F, and 82 minutes at 136°F. So cooking below USDA recommended temperatures is safe, as long as you don't go too low or too fast. Click here for excerpts from the USDA technical
document. Click here for another document from USDA explaining how they came to select 165°F as the minimum temperature for poultry.
Here is a chart of how many minutes (on the left) it takes to make a chicken or turkey safe at different temperatures (along the bottom).
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