One of three ways: Dead, Dieing, or Really Ticked Off…
You would ask this when I’ve just given up beef for Lent! (Not religious, I just do this to test myself. Dang it, I might make vegetarian one day!)
Rare.
Still mooing.
medium rare. i grew up thinking i disliked steak because my parents cooked it well done. then i tried my at the time boyfriend’s medium rare steak and have ordered it that way ever since. yum.
Black and Blue, or “still mooing” if they don’t know what that means. (I don’t go to real classy steak joints.)
I like the outside well cooked and crispy, and the inside as rare as possible, needs to be a thick cut not a wafer thin cheap cut. Season to eat with fresh cracked pepper and salt.
Medium rare. Seared enough to brown and tenderize but still pink inside. I like lamb the same way.
Quoth Wheelz:
I’m confused. “Fully cooked but not yet charred” is well-done. Medium is still pink (i.e., not fully cooked) in the center. The only time you ever get charred is when you get some unprofessional snob of a chef who’s bound and determined to punish any heathen who dares order it well.
Even medium well still has a tiny hint of pink in it.
When I was a line cook working the grill, I was always annoyed at the number of people who don’t really understand what the temperatures are supposed to indicate. A lot of people seem to think that “medium” means it has all the pink cooked out of it.
Medium rare. In my experience, most cuts cooked beyond that lose flavor, texture and tenderness.
Medium rare. As God intended it.
I said rare, but it really does depend on the cut and quality of the meat. For some cuts I go up to med. rare, but never more done than that.
I’m probably the lone stand out here. Well done, no mooing allowed! Yes, I know, I’m a complete barbarian.
Oh thank goodness, I’m not alone. Funny that huh? They complain that they’re “ruining” it, but they do SUCH a yummy job of it.
We should go pillage Rome together, because I feel the same way.
No, no, it’s the barbarians who eat their meat raw. Civilized people cook it.
Call me crazy, but the mere sight of pinkness in meat on my plate makes me gag. I take my steak well-done, and preferably blackened on the outside. I’ve been known to set off the smoke alarm in my kitchen cooking my meat all the way through.
If that were the case, they’d come off the cow already cooked.
Ordering a well-done steak isn’t a preference; it’s a food crime. Plus it’s a waste of money because you’re shelling out for a nice cut, but it will have the texture, flavor, and consistency of ox liver crusted with charcoal.
From a culinary standpoint, the blood and juices are certainly delicious, but the black&brown crowd in my circle opts to ruin their steak out of some deep-seated fear of contagion and a desire to be as disconnected from the idea of slaughtering animals as possible – in my view. Not only do I relish a rare ribeye, I unabashedly face up to the fact that I’m eating meat. From an animal. That was killed. For me. Additional sentence fragment. For effect.
There’s nothing to the contagion concern with steak anyhow. Once the surface is seared, you’re set. Burger has the potential to be problematic because grinding has essentially given the meat 100% surface area.
Bourdain infamously wrote about it, and I’ve seen it myself in *nice *kitchens: if you order well done, you’re getting the shittiest piece of meat they have. The one that got pushed to the back of the walk-in and forgotten, the gnarled gristly piece that shouldn’t have left the butcher’s, the one the pothead busboy got caught stealing and microwaving; that’s your steak. Because they know once it’s had the life cooked out of it, you can’t tell. No one could. And also, they kinda hate you.