How Long to Cook Chicken Breasts in the Oven at 250 Degrees – The Complete Guide

Temperature and Timing for Sous Vide Chicken

Just like any food cooked sous vide, the final texture and doneness of chicken is dependent on both time and temperature. With poultry, it is also important to consider food safety when choosing your preferred cook settings.

There is a misconception about what constitutes a safe cooking temperature for meat. You’ve probably heard that in order for chicken to be safe, it ought to be cooked all the way to 165°F (74ºC). Yet sous vide cooking often takes place well below the 140°F (60ºC) mark, in excess of four hours, and our own recommendation for cooking chicken falls in the 145 to 150°F (63 to 66°C) range.

Here’s the thing: Food safety is a function of both temperature and time.

Chicken is considered safe to eat when there is a 7.0 log10 relative reduction in salmonella bacteria. That is, a reduction that ensures that out of every 10,000,000 bacteria living on that piece of chicken to start, only one will survive.

At 165°F (74ºC), you achieve pasteurization nearly instantly. At 136°F (58ºC), it takes a little over an hour for the bacteria to slowly wither to death in the heat. In fact, you can even pasteurize chicken as low as just above 130°F (54ºC), but we don’t recommend it. At that temperature, chicken has a very soft, almost raw texture that is simply not appealing.

It’s important to note that these times represent the minimum safe cooking time for chicken after it has reached those temperatures internally, which can take up to 45 minutes. To be safe, our recommended cooking times add an extra hour to the pasteurization time when chicken is cooked from the fridge or two hours when starting with frozen meat.

Want more details? Dive even deeper into the science behind pasteurization and get full time and temp charts on our pasteurization guide.

The hotter you cook chicken, the more juice it expels. Since we want to keep as much juice in the chicken as possible, it makes sense to cook it at a low temp to keep its moisture intact. But there’s a limit as to how low you want poultry cooked — medium-rare chicken is quite soft and not always desirable.

To find the perfect temperatures for both white and dark meat, we cooked near-identical chicken pieces to temperatures ranging from 135°F (57ºC) up to 165°F (74ºC), measuring the moisture lost to the bag in each sample and tasting the results.

From a quantitative perspective, the differences are pretty dramatic.

Chicken cooked to 150°F (66°C) loses twice as much juice as chicken cooked to 140°F (60°C), though subjectively, both taste plenty juicy. Even at 160°F (71ºC), chicken cooked sous vide is markedly juicier than when cooked via more traditional methods.

Texture also shows a dramatic change as you cook your chicken progressively hotter, and unlike juiciness, it’s a change that’s very readily apparent when you eat it. Just like any overcooked chicken, once you get to around 155°F (68ºC), sous vide chicken breast starts to take on an unpleasant chalky, tacky texture. But again, this is far less than with conventional cooking methods.

You can opt to replicate your favorite sous vide times and temps in the Anova Precision Oven if you’d like.

To slightly speed up the process, you can use the oven’s food probe to tell you exactly when the core of your chicken has hit its target temperature. Or you can really speed up your chicken by cooking with Sous Vide Express. This cooking mode uses a slightly elevated oven temperature to cut cooking time by about half.

However, keep in mind that if you’re cooking chicken to a core temperature below 145°F (63°C) or so, it is best to use traditional sous vide times and temps in order to ensure that the meat has been properly pasteurized.

No matter which method you choose, extended cooking times in the Anova Precision Oven will have the same effect on texture as with a Precision Cooker.

Between 140ºF (60ºC) and 145°F (63ºC) is our preferred temperature range for chicken breast served hot, and we generally aim for the hotter end of that scale. Chicken cooked to 140°F (60°C) has a very tender, extremely juicy and smooth texture that is firm and completely opaque and shows no signs of stringiness or tackiness. It melts between your teeth.

Once you get over the 150°F (66°C) hump, things start to look a little more traditional. The chicken will still be plenty moist and tender, but it will have some of its signature stringiness. This is our preferred temperature for chicken that’s destined to be served cold as a salad.

When you get to around 160°F (71°C), you’re in well-done territory. It’s hard to accurately describe the texture of well-done sous vide chicken. Imagine the texture of traditional roast chicken from, say, your high school cafeteria. Now imagine that the chicken is just as stringy with that tacky texture as you bite down on it with your molars, except it’s also extremely juicy and moist. If you are a lover of traditional roast chicken but have always wished it was more moist, then this may be the temperature range for you.

Timing matters: While it’s tempting to set your Precision Cooker to a given temperature, drop in your chicken breasts, then walk away until you’re ready to eat, it’s not the best idea. After all, it’s still possible to overcook meat with sous vide cooking, but it’s much, much more difficult.

Just as bacterial reduction is a function of temperature and time, the breakdown of proteins within the chicken breast is also dependent on temperature and time. The longer a piece of chicken sits at a given temperature, the more it breaks down and the softer it becomes. Instead of tasting tender, overcooked sous vide chicken gets an unpleasantly mushy texture.

For best results, we recommend never cooking chicken for any longer than four hours.

We don’t recommend using sous vide express for cooking chicken breast below 145°F (63°C) because it cannot be properly pasteurized without an extended sous vide cooking time.

Unlike chicken breasts, chicken thighs and drumsticks are high in connective tissue with robust flavor and a texture that can withstand a bit more cooking. Indeed, at lower than 150°F (66°C), they are nearly inedible, chewy, and tough.

At 150°F (66°C), juices just begin to run clear but tougher connective tissue like large tendons will still be a little chewy. This is a good range if you like a very robust, meaty texture. The chicken cooks up almost like a steak in between 1 to 2 hours.

Once you get to 165°F (74°C), timing comes into play. With shorter cook times, you end up with chicken that is more tender than chicken cooked to 150°F (66ºC) and just slightly more dry. With extended cooking times, up to 24 hours, the chicken begins to fall apart much more readily.

Expelled chicken juices and broken down connective tissues start to collect in the bag, forming a gel which can be subsequently used to form a flavorful pan sauce.

Whole Chicken in the Anova Precision Oven

Since whole chickens contain both white and dark meat (duh), you’ll need to choose which style of meat you’d like to optimize when choosing your cooking temperature. If you love ultra juicy white meat and don’t mind pink and slightly tough dark meat, pick a temp in the lower range. If you prefer to have fully tender dark meat and you’re okay with slightly stringy (but still moist) white meat, pick a temp in the higher range.

Either way, you’ll be finishing the chicken in the oven, which will bump up the final serving temp a smidge. We’ve dropped the probe temp down by 5°F (2°C) relative to the chicken parts above to accommodate.

We don’t recommend using sous vide express for cooking chicken breast below 145°F (63°C) because it cannot be properly pasteurized without an extended sous vide cooking time.

BAKED CHICKEN BREAST | juicy, tender, easy, and oh, so flavorful!