Sous Vide Time and Temperature Guide

Sous vide (French for “under vacuum”) is a precision cooking method where food is sealed in a bag and submerged in a water bath held at a specific temperature. Unlike conventional cooking, which uses high heat and relies on timing alone, sous vide achieves perfect doneness edge-to-edge because the water temperature equals the desired internal food temperature.

Core principle: Food can never exceed the water bath temperature, no matter how long it stays in. This eliminates overcooking as long as the target temperature matches your desired doneness.

How thickness affects time: Getting heat to the middle of a piece of food is a diffusion problem, and diffusion is slow in a way that catches people out. Time does not rise in step with thickness, it rises far faster: roughly with thickness to the 1.65 power.

Minimum time (minutes) ≈ 13 × (Thickness in cm)^1.65

You will often see this quoted as “time goes with the square of thickness, so doubling it quadruples the time”. That overstates it. Doubling the thickness multiplies the time by about three, not four. Either way the lesson holds: measure the thickest part, and do not guess.

Thermal diffusivity barely differs between beef, pork and fish, so the same curve covers all of them. What changes between proteins is the temperature you are heading for, not how long the heat takes to get there.

The calculator will not go below 30 minutes however thin the food is. The formula keeps falling away below that, but the bath itself takes a few minutes to recover once cold food goes in, and a thin fillet needs long enough for that to settle. Thirty minutes is the practical floor.

Temperature guide by protein:

“Rare” means different things down that column. On chicken it is not raw, it is the lowest bath that still pasteurizes given enough time. On salmon, 110°F gives you something closer to sashimi that has been warmed through.

Food safety with sous vide: The key insight is that pasteurization is a function of both temperature AND time, not temperature alone. Chicken held at 140°F/60°C for around 35 minutes ends up as safe as chicken that touched 165°F/74°C for an instant. That is why sous vide chicken can be cooked well below the traditional “safe” number, and it is also why the time matters more here than anywhere else in cooking. The calculator adds that hold on top of the time the centre needs, so the minute figure it gives you for poultry is a safety floor, not a suggestion.

Finishing after sous vide: Most proteins benefit from a quick 60–90 second sear in a very hot cast iron pan after the water bath. This creates the Maillard reaction (browning and flavor) that sous vide alone cannot achieve.

Equipment needed:

• Immersion circulator, the wand that heats and stirs the water. This is the only part you cannot improvise.
• Vacuum sealer, or ordinary zip-lock bags and the water displacement method, which costs nothing and works fine for anything you are cooking the same day
• A large stockpot, or a dedicated container if you do this often

Circulators start cheap and climb steeply, and the expensive ones mostly buy you app control and a quieter pump rather than better cooking. Prices move about and vary a lot by country, so check current listings rather than trusting a figure written into a web page.