My Scallops were Awesome but the Steak was rare...Follow

Especially when I never said that humans aren't animals.

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Edit: Damn you, Youtube!

Edited, Sep 29th 2012 9:51am by Jophiel

And when I was 5 I could buy a bag of chips, a chocolate bar and a pop for less than $1. Not really relevant to what I can actually buy all of that for today.

Raw fish is yummy. Absolutely love sushi and maki. I've had raw meat before, usually due to mishaps with hot spots on the grill and varying thickness of steak on the grill at the same time. I don't really like the chewy/gummy texture. I wouldn't mind trying some properly prepared raw steak though. A nice rare or medium-rare steak that oozes out blood as I move it and cut it is what I prefer. The softness and tenderness of the meat is to die for. If we have bread I'll drag it through the blood, whether I've buttered the bread or used it for a steak sandvich. There's a reason au jus is a thing.

If someone likes their steak well done I'll usually just look at them and be like why would you do this? The ones who annoy me though are the ones who want it well done and use a-1 or ketchup because their steak is too dry and doesn't have enough taste.


***** your silly standards. Just cut the damn thing open and see what color it has. Science didn't spontaneously go full ****** and start producing different colors at different temperature ranges.

Edited, Sep 29th 2012 11:00pm by Deadgye

Now I really want some steak.

How sure of that are you?

Also, many restaurants seem to have different standards on what constitutes a particular doneness. I usually just hedge my bets and order my steak medium because I like my steak medium rare but can't tolerate rare and am fine with medium well but don't like it well done.

That's why I started ordering "medium well". I found out that "well done" for some places mean "leather". At good restaurants, I can order well done and still have the meat fall apart as I cut it.

Mostly because of this thread, I ordered a steak at the restaurant we ate at last night. I ordered it medium without thinking about it, and ended up with a medium-rare piece. Which worked out for me, at least, because I prefer medium-rare anyway. Just thought it was funny, thinking about this thread.

I'm considering making steak now. Perhaps I'll ask the coin.

All hail the coin. Guess I'll go defrost some of the many steaks in the freezer and then toss on a dry rub while the grill heats up. And I guess put some initial d on the 55inch for good measure. 640x480 on a 55inch is silly.

The variation isn't as great as you're implying though. There's a range of temperatures for a given doneness and you appear to be picking the top of a range at some point in the past and comparing to the bottom of a range today. You're also making hay out of what is essentially less consistent standards in the past compared with today. The variation is between different older sources. There isn't much disagreement today, so it's not like you don't know today what you're getting if you order a given level of doneness. Now, if you happen to hop in a time machine and travel back 80 years or so, then you might need to worry.


The change isn't in the meat doneness itself, but what some cooks (or those writing cook books) called them. It's not like the temperature to get a given cut of meat to a given cooked doneness has physically changed. Also, it's not surprising that older sources would call for higher temperatures. We have vastly better meat handling processes in place today (and antibiotics!). People didn't cook the meat more back then because it tasted better (and it's not hard to find sources commenting on this fact), but because if you didn't cook meat to 140 or higher (preferably 160 even) people could get sick.

I'm also unsure how your comment refutes my point that ordering a strip or ribeye well done is effectively a waste of your money. It is. The entire point of paying top dollar for a cut of meat from the more tender parts of the cow is for that tenderness. The less you cook it, the more tender and flavorful the result. Within the range of meat from the loin/shortribs portion of the cow you get variation in flavor (from marbling) versus tenderness. This is why a ribeye is more flavorful but less tender than a tenderloin (and why filet mignon is almost always served with sauce or a strip of bacon wrapped around it). Once you get outside that range, the effects of grade matter less and preparation matters more (to both tenderize and flavor the result).


Again, the *only* reason to pay more money for those more tender cuts of beef is so you can cook them with less additional preparations (ie: naked, or with just some minor seasoning, right on a grill then to the plate). You're paying so you can maximize the natural flavor and texture of the beef itself. And the more you cook it, the less of those things you get. Yes. You *can* marinate a ribeye or strip for 6 hours, then cook it to an internal temperature of 170 degrees, cross slice it, slather sauce on, and have a delicious result. But you could get the exact same result using flank or skirt steak for 1/2 to 1/3rd the cost. So you're wasting money. Which was kind of my point.

Oh. For a story going in the other direction. I was talking about stew recipes with a friend of mine, and mentioned that I used chuck meat sliced into cubes. He got all uppity or something about how he cuts his stew meat from good cuts of steak. I was like "why the hell would you do that?". I just find it interesting that many people don't seem to grasp that different cuts of meat are for different purposes. Just paying more for something doesn't mean a better result. But he seemed absolutely positive that he was somehow adding something amazing to his stew by paying 5 times more for the meat.

Personally, I find it an affront to a good steak to cut it up and toss it in a stew, but that's just me. Just another example of wasting the qualities of something by using it in a way that doesn't take advantage of them. I suspect he was kinda missing the whole reason for stew existing as a meal in the first place.