Homemade Sausage Making

Today I was making some roast beef sandwich meat which I hope will be a respectable clone of Arby's roast beef. Anyhow after stuffing a chub and putting it in the smokehouse I was left with a couple pounds of extra mince. Rather than wasting it I wrapped it in cellophane and placed it in a ziplock bag and stuck started to cook it sous vide so I could experiment with the texture of this luncheon meat cooked to 132F versus that cooking in the smoker to an internal temp of 155F.

This is new ground for me and I want to be safe so I looked at the pasteurization temperatures for meat but couldn't find anything much directed at the pasteurization temperature and lethality times of minced meat.

What I did find was this.


http://www.foodhandler.com/cooking-past ... fer-foods/

According to this the lethality time for a whole muscle at 133F is 55 minutes.

Then below this it says the lethality time for ground meat is 15 seconds at 155F.

If you look back at the whole muscle table it says the time is 22 seconds at 155F which is actually longer for a whole muscle than mince but essentially they are about the same.

With this in mind, does it sound reasonable that if I kept the "test mince" at 133F for 2.5 hours it should result in a safe cook? Seems to me it would but I may be missing something. I just want to compare these two cooking methods and compare the end product.

According to the experts, you're safe. Take look at what serious eats.com says about the safety of sous vide burgers.

With sous-vide methods, you have a bit more leeway as beef can be safely pasteurized at temperatures as low as 130°F if held for long enough. At 130°F, it takes 2 hours to safely pasteurize beef, while at 140°F, it takes only 12 minutes. Remember-these time frames begin once the center of the burger reaches pasteurization temperature, so it's a good idea to add an extra half hour to those times for any burger you plan on pasteurizing.
Pasteurization cannot safely take place lower than 130°F, so for this reason, I strongly recommend freshly grinding beef for sous-vide burgers you plan on serving rare to medium-rare.
http://www.seriouseats.com/2015/08/the- ... .html#safe

Thanks. That's what I was thinking but this is all new to me but it makes sense and I like having the luxury of keeping it in the water bath longer and not having to worry about it overcooking.


With my test I think I think the sous vide meat was a little more moist than the chub I smoked in the smokehouse but both were good.