Sous Vide Thickness Ruler
Get Our Sous Vide Thickness Ruler
One of the biggest complaints we get is that we don't properly address cooking sous vide by thickness. We feel that in general cooking by tenderness is the easiest method to learn and is safer to implement since it helps to eliminate the need for exact temperatures. However, we do our best to listen to our readers so we've made our own version of a printable sous vide thickness ruler. To get the free ruler you just have to sign up for our Sous Vide Mailing, which is sent out every 2 to 4 weeks.
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We provide 3 different rulers with times for sous vide beef, chicken, and fish. The sous vide beef ruler has times for heating frozen and thawed beef and pasteurizing it at both 55°C and 60.5°C. The sous vide chicken has times for pasteurizing chicken at 57.5°C, 60.5°C, 63.5°C, and 66°C. The sous vide fish ruler has times for heating fatty fish, and pasteurizing both lean and fatty fish at 55°C and 60.5°C.
Why Cook Sous Vide by Thickness?
There are two ways to cook sous vide, one is based on the thickness of the food and the other is based on the desired tenderness.
Cooking based on thickness is how PolyScience, Baldwin, and Nathan started out as they did research on food safety. Cooking sous vide based on thickness basically tells you the minimum time you can cook a piece of meat to ensure it is safe and comes up to temperature in the middle. It doesn't take into account tenderizing time or any other factors. It's often used by restaurants or home cooks who want to minimize cooking time and are using tender cuts of meat that don't need the tenderization.
Cooking sous vide based on tenderness takes into account how tough a piece of meat is and how long it needs to be cooked in order to make it appealing. So a chuck steak needs to be cooked a lot longer than a filet, even though they are both safe after the same amount of time. As long as the minimum cooking time is met for the temperature used, then it's completely safe to eat.
Both sous vide methods have their uses. Thickness-based is great for very tender cuts cooked by people who need them done in the minimum amount of time. Tenderness-based is best for tougher cuts or people that have a range of time that they are interested in.
There are tenderness based cooking charts both in our sous vide app for
iPhone and
Android, as well as our book
Beginning Sous Vide. To get the thickness ruler just
sign up for our Sous Vide Newsletter.
A Few Notes on the Times
Times were extrapolated from the descriptions in
Baldwin's Practical Guide to Sous Vide and
Book, as well as
Nathan's tables on eGullet and a few other sources.
The times are also approximate since there are many factors that go into how quickly food is heated. The density of the food matters a lot, which is one reason beef heats differently than chicken. To a lesser degree where you get your beef from will also affect the cooking time, and whether the beef was factory raised, farm raised, or grass-fed. Because of this, I normally don't try to pull it out at the exact minute it is done unless I'm in a real rush.
The times shown are also minimum cooking times and food can be, and sometimes needs to be, left in for longer periods in order to fully tenderize the meat. If you are cooking food longer, remember that food should not be cooked at temperatures less than 55°C (131°F) for more than 4 hours.
This project was inspired by the
thickness ruler done by
PedroG at the sous vide wiki.
How to Use the Sous Vide Thickness Ruler
To use, simply print out the second page. I prefer printing it onto thick card stock so it's more rigid. You then just cut out the cards by following the dotted lines. Try to make the bottom as level as possible to ensure accurate measurements. I like to align a ruler along the line and draw a knife along it, just make sure you do it on a cutting board!
I also recommend measuring the lines to make sure they are still correct. We've testing the printing out of several programs, on PC and Macs, and on various printers and it normally comes out properly but double checking never hurts. Sometimes a program will try to scale the image, which will result in distorted measurements.
Once it is cut out, simply hold the card up to the thickest point of the food you are preparing to cook and follow the time listed in the column you want.
For example, if you wanted to heat a piece of beef tenderloin you would hold the Beef card up to the beef. If it is 35mm thick you would then cook it for an hour and forty minutes if it was in the refrigerator or two hours if it was frozen. Remember, these are the minimum times needed, you can cook it for an hour or two longer if you aren't in a hurry.
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