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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Yes. Longer consistent cook times allow you to pasteurize at lower temperatures, so you can serve chicken at a lower temperature than you would in a conventional oven. (I'm not saying you'd want to do that; I don't like pink chicken.)

Chicken is unfortunately one of the less effective things to cook this way. At the times/temps I'm comfortable with, breasts get mushy. Legs, on the other hand, "pink out"; the proteins from inside the bones leach into the flesh and give a bloody appearance which I can't get past.

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Thanks! I think most people equate "medium rare chicken" with food poisoning, so it was interesting to see that used in the video. Never knew that you could actually cook it safely that way.

Medium rare chicken is like medium rare pork. If you can get over your upbringing enough times to get used to it, you can never go back. It me took 3-4 times for each, and the only reason I stuck with it was that my snobbery overpowered my mother's education.

But really, sous-vide, medium rare chicken breast has a taste and texture you'd never think chicken breast could have. Same with pork, it's a revelation on all the things you miss out in the world due to prejudice and bad information.

EDIT: I've never gotten mushy breasts tptacek, how long are you cooking those things for? I do 1.5 hours@57-60C or so.

60C is really very low for a chicken breast.

It's an acquired taste, for sure. 63C is still worlds away from what most people consider a normal chicken breast.

i disagree. having grown up eating hockey puck pork chops and dry chicken, medium rare pork is delicious while medium rare chicken is just gross and unappetizing.

a good thoroughly cooked, yet juicy and delicious roast chicken is still one of the most basic, yet difficult, dishes to prepare.

Living in Japan it's much more acceptable to eat pink or even raw chicken here. I will vouch for it being much easier to cook a nice juicy (and tastier) piece of chicken when you don't need to worry about under cooking it.

I think the laws are different in Japan, in the United Kingdom at least, it's entirely legal to sell chicken which contains Escherichia coli, which causes food poisoning, where as meat such as Beef is not allowed to be sold with the bacterium.

That certainly has an effect on my thinking, it's not that I don't like a more rare presented chicken, it's that we're conditioned to think of it causing illness because of the laws around it's distribution.

Mushy breasts?

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