Merry Christmas!
I have a rib roast going in a sous vide with the intent of finishing off in a few hours for Christmas dinner. However we have a bug going around the house that started after I put the roast in the water this morning about 8:00 am.
Thinking of postponing dinner until tomorrow. What should I do now?

1.Finish cooking and get the crust as I normally would then put in fridge and reheat tomorrow?

2.Leave it in the bag, back to fridge, then bring it back up to temp tomorrow in the sous vide then high heat for crust?

Is #2 safe?

I've done the second option a number of times on prime rib/brisket and never had an issue.

If you are worried about it you could quench it in an ice water bath for an hour or two to bring the temp down faster, or make sure it is in the water long enough tomorrow to pasteurize.


Option one works too but unless you reheat with the sous vide, it will be noticeably drier

If the meat stayed below 40 degrees, it is fine. Even if it came above that for a little while, you should be OK. Anything over, say, 30 minutes to an hour, I'd cook it.

I'm going to get a 5 gallon beverage cooler soon to "thaw" any raw meat (packaged or not) with an ice bath. You can keep stuff in there with water and ice as long as you could keep it in a fridge but it will thaw way faster. I don't want my current beverage cooler touching raw meet, or anything else other than ice and drinkable liquid.

It has been sitting in a vac bag at 124 for 7ish hours right now. The plan was to pull it out at about 8 hours in the sous vide and either use the oven or egg to finish off.

Thank you, the ice bath is a good idea that I hadn't thought about.

At 124 it will need to have been at full temp internally for several hours to be safe, at 130 it's about 2 hrs. If it's hit that min temp / time then I would think a quick cool in ice and re-heat tomorrow before finishing would give the best results.

Read the title and thought "rib roast" was telling a funny story of how your wife screwed up some food