Nicer hamburger joints allow you to choose a level of doneness for your burger. I understand that the problem if you buy ground beef from a supermarket is that the e. coli that is or can be on the surface of the meat gets ground into the whole volume of meat once its ground and that’s why we have to cook ground beef to “done” where steaks or other whole cuts just need the outer surface cooked. Right?
So how do restaurants do it?
“Nicer” hamburger joints grind their own ground beef.
They don’t keep it perfectly clean. 100% of ground beef from a restaurant or supermarket has e. coli in it. You can’t clean the grinding machinery well enough to keep it all out and surface e, coli gets distributed throughout the meat during grinding so it is only killed at higher cooking temperatures. That normally isn’t a problem because the level and strain of e. coli present in most samples isn’t enough to make a normal person sick but it can. People always take some risk when they eat undercooked ground meat like hamburger but the risk is minimal when the meat comes from a trusted source that is regularly inspected for suspect strains and levels of e. coli contamination. That risk is often worth it to people that like meat that is less than well done. People were terrified of eating less than well done pork for decades but now those guidelines have been relaxed to allow more palatable preparation since that risk is also very low.
The risk is worth it to me; I’m just a bit surprised the risk is worth it to the restaurants.
Most restaurants that let you choose your own doneness for meats also seem to have a warning in their menu along the lines of “The consumption of undercooked meats is a potential health hazard” (with the actual verbiage being more legalese). I suspect that’s how they cover themselves if someone gets sick after ordering a raw hamburger or something.
Most also have chefs that know how to cook properly. Really, the danger of e. coli poisoning is pretty over-stated. When beef is involved (whether steak or ground) generally it’s because the cook did it sloppily without ensuring that the center got warm enough. Crappy restaurants avoid this problem by simply refusing to sell rare meat, so the center gets done properly by default. Good restaurants know how to cook a rare burger or steak without poisoning you.
I’m not sure how this is right. A rare steak or burger has an internal temperature of 120-125F. From what I can find online, hamburger should be cooked to 160F to kill e coli. And how do you account for good restaurants who serve carpaccio and steak tartare?
It doesn’t really have to do with the cooking temperature, so much as the cleanliness of the facilities and the quality of the meat, although there still is risk involved. (I say, as an enthusiastic eater of raw and barely cooked meat.) There’s no secret to cooking a rare hamburger correctly. You should be using meat that’s good enough to eat raw to begin with, because you’re not getting much pathogen-killing heat in the very center of the burger, just on the outside.
Pasteurizing food is a function of heat+time. You can pasteurize a burger at 120F if you cook it long enough. Good places will take a little longer to cook your burger. It’s possible that some will cook the meat using sous vide.
I don’t think jsgoddess is referring only to the legal dangers of e. coli poisoning. If you’re a restaurant owner, and word gets out that YOUR restaurant’s food made someone sick, your fancy legal disclaimer isn’t going to save you from the sort of bad publicity that could cause you to go out of business.
E. coli in meat only comes through exposure to fecal matter (shit) chiefly during the butchering process, or through unclean handling by people or contaminated machinery. There is no E. coli inside a steak so it doesn’t matter how hot the inside gets, only that you cook the outside well enough to kill any possible surface contamination.
Because hamburger is made from many different pieces of scrap meat at factory processors the possiblity of contaminatiion is much greater. If you were to make your own ground beef by starting with a chuck roast and observing clean handling practices you can easily make yourself a burger that is safe to eat rare.
E. coli is not an inherant property of meat, it is a gut bacteria and is an inherant property of shit, and if you keep the two apart you are safe.
As for vegetables, the E. coli contamination is also due to exposure to feces somewhere along the line. From fertizer, animals in the field, unclean handling or packaging, a worker taking a dump in the field, washing in contaminated water, a lot of possible sources but in the end it all starts with poop.
Interesting thread.
Would time be a factor? If it goes from butchered to ground to served in a short period of time does that help any?
Just a reminder that not only does 100% of ground beef from a restaurant have e. coli in it as someone else mentioned, 100% of all of us have large amounts of e. coli in our guts (OK - maybe minus newborns). It’s particular strains of e. coli. that are very nasty. So a restaurant could get away with some level of e. coli for a long time if luck was on their side.
Yes, I know that, but I doubt most burgers cooked rare are held long enough at the internal temperature to kill off pathogens. After all, they’re generally being cooked with a pretty high heat source (certainly not being sous vided in 99.99% of places), so I can’t really see how this would work.
There are numerous cases of food poisoning that we all experience. Most of us consider it indigestion or use the misnomer of ‘stomach flu’ or ‘the runs’ or ‘the trots’.
So, you can eat contaminated food and so can many other people. Should a particularly nasty strain encounter a fair number of people, a number of them won’t have the proper immune response, etc. They will get very ill, and other factors might contribute to their death.
Two major factors are involved in e. coli contamination. First, proper slaughtering procedures are required to keep fecal matter away from meat. The second is the time spent since slaughter at particular temperatures. Kept frozen or just above the freezing point in a clean environment, it will take a long time for e. coli to reproduce to dangerous levels of infection in the meat. The higher the temperature, the faster the e. coli will reproduce and eventually reach dangerous concentrations. With proper handling from slaughter to cooking, the chance of e. coli infection is negligible. If a restaurant can demonstrate that proper procedures have been followed, the chain of responsibility will go back through the suppliers, shippers, and slaughterhouses. It’s an excellent reason for restaurants to take food safety seriously. If someone gets sick, and points at the restaurant, and the restaurant is found to be violating health codes, the buck stops there, even with no evidence that the restaurant was at fault in that particular case. That restaurant owner has to hope that someone else gets sick at a different restaurant that uses the same supplier.
Without digging out a proper cite…
No you can’t.
That’s not how pasteurization works. Rock a Wiki. That should be close enough to a cite. ( I admit is isn’t the best choice…but it’s what I"ve got )
There’s more involved in pasteurization than just heating something to a certain temperature. Things that would render a burger unenjoyable in a restaurant setting, like *immediate *cooling, and in the case of liquids, filtration. Plus…the temps are closer to around 140 F, not 120 F.
Sous Vide is very different than pasteurization, and involves food that is not initially tainted by much bacteria, and is cooked in a vacuum sealed bag which limits the growth of aerobic bacteria like E. Coli.
Also…there are different levels of bacterial growth, which occur at different temperature points. For example - 98.6 F is a wonderful temperature for most aerobic bacteria to grow like wildfire. 110 F is a less wonderful temperature, so you get slightly less growth, but still growth. 120 F is less wonderful, and so on and so forth, all the way up to 165 F, where most meat-residing bacteria that can harm us just dies. Another example - many fish-born bacteria or parasites are killed by proper cooking, and they are also killed by FREEZING them below 0 F for a certain minimum time. However, if you just hold your food at 120 F for an extended period of time, bacterial growth will STILL HAPPEN, just more slowly. Don’t go putting your burgers on the stove on the “warm” temperature setting for two days and think you’re doing yourself any good. And let’s not even get started on the anaerobic bacteria that can grow in vacuum-sealed packages of meat which are popular today.
So…to the OP. The truth is simple - humans have immune systems, and restaurants have become pretty good at controlling the spread of bacteria between uncooked foods. So if there’s not much bad bacteria there to begin with, it doesn’t need to be killed via high temperature cooking. So the odds are in the favor of rare beef. Still not perfect, and you can still get sick, but it’s unlikely.
Time is a factor but less so than cleanliness. As noted, e.coli is in fecal matter. If a cow is butchered cleanly and handled carefully there will be very little e.coli on the meat. I disagree with the argument that all meat has e.coli, it is possible to butcher and handle a cow in a way that never exposes the meat to e.coli. Practically speaking in today’s industrial feedlots and processors though most meat is going to have at least a tiny bit on it because all meat passes through the same conveyors and machinery. However there are small independent organic farms that high-end steakhouses use who very likely do provide e.coli free meat.
Back to the point, the key is that meat should remain in it’s primal form for as long as possible. E.coli will grow over time, but if the hunks of beef aren’t ground/portioned until the last minute that e.coli growth will be limited to the surface area. Ground beef is essentially ALL surface area so the e.coli will start to grow rapidly after it’s ground if it’s not held at proper temperatures. Meat that’s recently butchered and cooked is safer than meat that’s been sitting around for a couple weeks, but meat that been sitting around a couple weeks after being butchers cleanly and store properly will be cleaner than fresh meat that was handled improperly and stored at room temp.
<chef hat>
A lot is also dictated to us by the state/county/local health department, whose standards probably vary somewhat from one jurisdiction to another. Here in Washington, we’re required to cook all ground beef to a minimum internal temperature of 155 degrees Fahrenheit. No exceptions for “non-crappy” restaurants. A cook who serves undercooked ground beef is violating industry regulations and putting himself and his restaurant (and of course, the person eating the ground beef) at risk.
</chef hat>
Mister Rik, do restaurants in your area ask how you would like you burger done?
None of the ones I eat at or have cooked for; can’t speak for the others. I’ve had customers order less-than-well-done burgers in more than one place, and before the Jack in the Box e. coli thing I did what I could to accomodate them (which was sometimes hard to do when working with pre-formed patties that were only about 1/4" thick, because those just cook through too fast), but since the whole e. coli thing we pretty much have to say “no can do”.
For my own tastes, while I prefer my steak rare-to-medium-rare, I can’t abide undercooked hamburger. That’s more a texture thing than a flavor thing, though.