The red stuff in red meat isn’t blood. It is myoglobin, a protein found in muscles to store oxygen.
There appears to be near unanimity among the MAD dopers on this subject. At the next gathering I think Airman, Juanita and I should mind the grill.
As an aside I have stopped ordering much steak for this reason. It is one of the easiest things to make at home and if I’m eating at a restaurant I prefer having something I can’t make myself.
I liked my steak well-done in my younger days, but I’m finding as I get older, I like it less, um, cooked. Mom took a while, but just of late she, too, is finding that her meat tastes better if it has a bit of pink in it. I’ve taken to eating it medium just of late. Also, being broke, I tend to take advantage of “graveyard specials,” which means that I’m usually at the restaraunt when the place is mostly dead, so the cook doesn’t have the excuse of too many orders to watch. I’m often the only live body in the place, except for the people who work there.
A few months back I was eating at a local neighborhood casino restaraunt, graveyard special (how I love them), and ordered a steak, medium-well. It arrived well-done. Not a shred of pink anywhere in the meat. I sent it back, and got a new one. Well done. I eventually did find a tiny, tiny spot of pink in the meat so I called it good enough. The waiter apologized profusely, and explained that the head cook was on vacation, and the kitchen was now staffed by trainees, who, for the most part, did not speak English.
Now, for the fun part. My mom works as a concierge for a time-share resort (yeah, I know, and so does she, but we have rent to pay). She frequently gets comped tickets to second-string shows and meals at less well-known restaurants because the management hopes that if she enjoys the experience she will recommend the place to the resort’s “guests”.
Nobody in this town knows how to cook a steak any way other than well-done. I’ve gone from ordering my steaks medium well, to medium, to medium rare to rare. Invariably, the steak comes well-done. I usually just go ahead and eat it- I’ve given up on sending them back, I just get another well-done steak, but Mom makes sure the wait staff knows we were not pleased. She also makes sure (before the meal is ordered) that she is the concierge at a resort the joint has an arrangement with.
Now really, you would think that if someone who had the power to have a serious financial impact on the establishment you work for (the resort Mom works for has the potential to send a substantial amount of business their way, or not…) based on whether that person would want to recommend it to people she encounterd at work on a day-to-day basis, you would want to make damn good and sure that that particular customer and/or her guest got their meal just exactly the way they ordered it, and failing that, throw in a free dessert to placate the person. Apparently, the restaurants just don’t see it that way.
Of course, now for my all-time favorite steak story.
well, not exactly a steak story…
I went to a local casino restaurant feeling very stressed out and in need of major comfort food. I ordered chicken-fried steak. The waitress asked me, “How do you want your steak?”
I gave her my very best, “you have got to be kidding” look and said, “chicken fried?”
She brought me a plate of fried chicken. When I protested that this was not chicken-fried steak, she said, “I thought you said ‘chicken fried’.”
“Yeah. I ordered chicken-fried steak.”
After a bit of back-and-forth, she brought me my chicken-fried steak, but kept coming back to the table every fifteen seconds to apologize, which was even more annoying than the initial mistake.
After that, I’m just a tad bit less upset when the medium rare steak I ordered arrives at the table well-done.
At least it was cut off the right kind of animal.