Around here (Chicago) I don’t find it at all unusual to get pork served pink in mid scale and higher restaurants. Among my crowd, it’s been accepted for at least 15 years. Even on the Dope, when recipes for loin are shared, I notice people aim for doneness of 150F-ish. I feel it’s fairly mainstream by now. If you read cooking magazines, you’ll find similar. I looked up a Serious Eats recipe and they recommended 145F and rest for ten minutes.
A couple of years ago I tried chicken sashimi. There was a mental block to ordering it, and I had to keep telling myself that it was ok. Once getting past the squeamish sensation, I really enjoyed it.
I love carpaccio and beef tartare. I’ve never had a problem with it. I also eat eggs raw in smoothies, but only eggs from our own hens.
And this. Only a few times in my life have I treated myself to prime meat. It’s expensive, often more than twice the cost of choice, and the difference is pretty much entirely in the fat marbling, something that is lost entirely if it is cooked to well done.
If you come over to my house for steak, and ask for it well done, you’ll be getting choice, as will everyone else at the table. I would only offer to pay for prime cuts of meat if everyone invited were among those who could appreciate the difference.
I still get tartare regularly from a Polish deli, and it’s never been an issue for me. Plenty of restaurants here have them too, some with raw egg, too. I’ll slice off some meat from a nice steak to eat raw as a snack before throwing it in a grill.
And for at least filet, I find choice bacon prime to be a pointless waste of money. Filet isn’t marbled much to begin with, prime doesn’t seem any more tender for that cut, so I’ll never buy a prime filet.
Your quote of me is putting what was said in the exact opposite context of what was actually stated.
Read more carefully next time.
This sounds too close to haemoglobin? Hemoglobin? (Spell check flagged it and has both so…?) for a lot of people. I’ve learned to say “red dye and water” with the crowd I’m typically eating/cooking steak with.
See, my feeling is that once you’ve offered the drink it’s effectively out of the bottle and into somebody’s stomach. Whether they drink it straight or mixed, it’s still gone.
I do have a bottle of extremely fine whiskey I’m saving for an upcoming occasion. I have a friend who doesn’t drink much and doesn’t like most alcohol. Even if he does happen to like this bottle there’s no way in hell he’ll appreciate it for what it is. And I could tell him that! He wouldn’t care one iota if I said, “you won’t like this, best stick to soda.”
But he’s going to be part of this occasion and if he wants some, he can have it. He can even have it mixed with something. Refusing him the opportunity to participate would only tarnish things for me, even if he couldn’t care less.
On the other hand, there’s no way in hell I’d bring this bottle to an event where any ol’ asshole could ask for some. I’m too polite to refuse and not rich enough to be happy about it. If I have something very nice that I want to share, I’m going to do it in a curated and controlled environment.
I don’t understand this whole thing about it only being proper to eat steak rare. I like mine medium rare, but occasionally blow it if cooking for myself in a hurry, and I can most definitely tell the difference in flavor even if the steak winds up well done between pasture raised and feedlot, between marbled or not, and even between different breeds of cattle.
And tenderness is not the only issue. I want my meat to taste like something. Wonder Bread is tender.
And “well done” doesn’t mean “charcoal puck”. In fact a lot of rarer steaks taste unpleasantly charcoally to me, because the people who cooked them apparently like those sear marks or even like the flavor of them.
If you’re inviting guests for steak, buy them all the same steak, and don’t worry about it.
Or occasionally if they’re more or less keeping kosher, and don’t want visible blood. Or visible myoglobin, for that matter.
No, it won’t, if it’s done right. Picking the one you expect to be tough sure increases the chances, though.
The issue isn’t buying choice instead of prime. The issue is buying prime for most of the guests, but choice for the one whose preferences you personally disagree with.
You missed all the responses from posters going out of their way to express contempt for the doneness choices of others?
Now I’m restricting the freedumb of the rareness is godliness crowd? They can obsess all they want, and I’m free to regard it as self-important silliness.
Okay… then you can look at it this way; a well-done steak will be more tough than one in some lesser degree of doneness, just by virtue of the way heat affects meat. (see my earlier post)
So it does make sense that you wouldn’t necessarily want to use a worse steak on someone expecting a more tender steak AND who is expecting it to be less than well done. In other words, someone wanting a rare steak or maybe medium is going to be able to notice the difference far more than someone expecting a well-done steak, just by virtue of the degree of cooking.
It’s like two people renting sports cars. You’ve got a Corvette and a Mustang. Do you give the Corvette to the person who’s more likely to drive it in a way that its performance shows, or do you rent it to the person who isn’t likely to exceed the speed limit? Both people get sports cars either way, but it would seem to me that you’d want to give the better car to the person more likely to appreciate it.
I agree that you can think of it how you like. But certain types of snark or offended responses can come off as self-important as well, and thus greatly weakens your point.
I said before that I used to eat steaks well done. I don’t anymore, but I still regard it as a perfectly valid choice. And I see nothing offensive at all about the idea that it’s harder to tell the quality of a steak if it is well done. While I said I could tell some difference, I also remember that steaks all tasted quite similar, with the flavor differences having more to do with seasoning and preparation (including aging). Different cuts matter, but not so much different grades.
Surely I’m not a steak snob. Hell, I still avoid anything with rare in the title. It must be medium or higher. And, while I do think ketchup covers up flavors, I have no problem with someone else using it. I just know from experience that more than a little bit will remove the nuances of any food it is used with.
I certainly didn’t mean to.
You said “Yes, I wouldn’t take the culinary advice from anyone who really thinks a well done steak is anything like a charcoal briquette. They’re really just telling you they don’t know to cook or taste.”
What did you mean when you said that the person is telling you that they don’t know how to cook or taste?
Autocorrect is meat-heavy today. That’s “choice versus prime.”
nm, not worth it
He’s making the exact same point you were. He’s saying that somebody who equates well-done steak with inedible food doesn’t know how to cook, and that well-done is perfectly a valid choice.
Got it. That makes more sense. I was reading it from the POV of someone annoyed about having to overcook a steak.
To the extent that longer cooking means less tender, it seems to me that it would make more sense to give the most tender steak to the person who’s choice of cooking might partially counteract that, in the interests of everone getting tender steak. (No, every bit of the marbling fat doesn’t cook out of a well-done steak; at least, unless your idea of “well done” is “turned into a cracker.”)
If they’re going to drive it on the public roads, I’d certainly give the faster car to the person less likely to drive it at its highest possible speed.
Sorry, that’s not what you meant, and it makes the analogy even less applicable. I’d probably actually check which person best fit the available seat adjustments. Nobody’s going to best appreciate a car that makes their back hurt. – whoops, no, that’s probably not what you meant, either. That analogy pretty clearly isn’t going to work for me.
Try this one: suppose you were able to get two train reservations; one for the express, one for a train that makes multiple stops. There are two people wanting to make the trip: one of them has a ten-minute trip to catch the train, the other one needs to travel for an hour just to get to the train station. Which of them would you give the express ticket to – the one who already has a head start, or the one who’s going to take longer even to get to the station?
But I’m not arguing that you should buy a better steak for the person who wants it well done than for the person who wants it scorched on the outside but almost raw in the middle, or the one who wants it somewhere inbetween. I’m saying get them all the same steak and cook it how they want it.
I’m curious: were they all feedlot beef of the same breed?
All I’m saying is that if there are performance differences, the person in the best position to appreciate or need that performance ought to be the ones who get it. In the train analogy, the person who needs to be at the destination first ought to get the express ticket, just like the person who drives faster ought to get the higher performing car, or the person who eats a rare steak ought to get the slightly better one (I don’t hold with the idea of downgrading the grade of steak for well-done, just the worse one within say… Prime beef.
Nobody’s not getting a train ticket, a sports car, or a prime steak in any situation.
I was presuming that the exact time of arrival didn’t matter, it was the total length of trip that was being considered: as the experience of eating the steak is what’s at issue here, not how soon one gets done or the effect of the steak on one’s nutritional status.
You’re assuming that the person who wants a rare steak is better able to appreciate everything about the steak than the person who wants it well done. That doesn’t necessarily apply. The person who wants a rare steak might not be concerned about flavor, being unable to taste distinctions that the one who wants it well done is very aware of and cares a good deal about. Or, of course, the other way around – but you can’t tell that by how well done they want their steak.