Sous Vide warning

[Mike Nolan]

Fellow BBGA member Peter Goulding posted the following on the BBGA forum:

This is not a bread topic but it may be one of concern for food preparation that deserves wide attention. There are no science citations but I’m paying attention.

In an article in the New York Sunday Times on February 21 by op ed columnist Nicholas Kristof (p. 7 in the Review section), he wrote a number of practical suggestions for daily life and healthy living including this:

“Above all, don’t microwave foods in plastic or topped with plastic wrap”

I've had intuitive concern about this for years so I’ve switched to glass. And that warning provoked me to wonder why the water in my sous vide container is always cloudy. See photo below.

There are only four sources possible for the cloudiness but the plastic bags are the obvious first suspects. I use Ziplock brand plastic bags so I wrote to the company to ask if they could explain the contamination. I noted that the cooking water temperature normally varies from ± 75° F to 190° F depending on the food being cooked.

The company’s excellent customer service wrote the following (partial) response:

“…the bags have not been tested for any type of water bath cooking including sous vide, so we cannot recommend using them for such purposes. Our bags have a melting/softening point of 149° F.”
I am going to switch to the bags being made by Anova - a company that is environmentally proactive and claims complete food safety for their products for sous vide cooking.

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