Hello, I'm looking at a new process for brining and then drying and have some micro (listeria, salmonella) concerns with how I want to go about this.
My brining process with a near boil for almost two hours has shown to be an adequate kill step (time and temperature & internal temperature) through bench testing. However, my concern is that the drying process is so slow and low temp around 100 F, that I am worried about growth after the kill step as the product would still be wet and in a high humidity environment for nearly 8 hours before it is completely dried down and has an aW of less 0.3.
Thoughts?