Medium rare steak is neither cool nor raw.
Tell that to my taste buds.
I prefer my lamb medium which to me means light pink and hot inside verging on grey.
Beef I ask for pink and warm inside. I have used the color/temp instead of rare etc. for years and it prevents misunderstanding.
I always preferred my steaks medium until I started eating good steaks at places who know what they’re doing. Now rare is the only way I’ll eat one.
I prefer flavor over some fantasy magical texture that somehow supercedes flavor for enjoyability.
Nicely browned for the extra carmelization and finely spiced, sauced, wrapped in bacon, or otherwise made to be more interesting and really bring out the flavor of the meat since this isn’t the 1700s and I don’t need to pretend like something is better because it’s pure because I can’t afford spices from the East.
/professional chef hat on
But then you run into the texture problem. Less-cooked is more tender, yes, but it’s also “rubbery”. A lot of older clients will order their steak cooked medium-well to well-done, simply because they find chewing rare to medium-rare steak difficult.
/professional chef hat off
Decent steak isn’t what I would call “rubbery” when raw. Maybe we have different definitions. It should not require any unusual amount of chewing. I have had rubbery steak (as mentioned in my previous post), but a decent prime or choice dry-aged strip is anything but rubbery when eaten raw. Now, you being a professional chef, I assume you get the nice prime cuts, but, unless you’re talking about chuck or something like that (and I’ve even had chuck that was fine texture-wise raw), I don’t quite see the “rubbery” description. To me, it’s more buttery and melt-in-your-mouth.
Salisbury and Swiss steaks aren’t too tasty rare, imho.
Round steak needs to be cooked long and with moisture. Beating the holy living shit out of it with a mallet or the back of a knife first isn’t a bad idea either.
Round steak is a really difficult cut. I like top and bottom round roast cooked medium rare in dry heat, but steaks from them do kind of have to have the crap beat out of them and prepared like cube steak or chicken fried steak or something like that. (And eye of round is just useless to me.) I generally dislike round steak for this reason. Now that’s a chewy cut.
London Broil is the most flavorsome cut of beef. it is tough-so slice it thin, and cook it rare-it is delicious.
Flank steak. The only way to cook it is to marinate it and then broil it just enough to brown the edges. (aka London broil, though most London broil cuts in supermarkets are not flank steak). The center should be deep red; the pieces cut on the bias. Anything more, and it’s tough.
London Broil isn’t any particular cut of meat. Shoulder, flank, top round can all work well. But it’s not a steak per se in the way a nice slab of sirloin or a rib steak is. It’s meant to be sliced thin so tougher cuts of meat are fine.
Part of the problem in this discussion is the subjective quality of tenderness. **Snarky Kong **posted a food science cite where tenderness is defined as the shear strength required to cut it raw, but for most people texture, moistness, and chewability factor into the equation. I don’t think it matters much, people know what they like, stick to that no matter what anyone else says about the tenderness.
The reason I cook steak is because of Taenia saginata (beef tapeworm)
Ditto, and double-ditto on the lamb. Please, for the love of food, stop serving lamb done all the way to a sad, grey color. Bonus: if you cook it properly, you don’t need any of that mint jelly (gag). Rare lamb with rosemary, red wine, and garlic…nom, nom, nom.
I no longer order burgers in restaurants. Seems they all cook the burgers way past the point of done and into “crusty and tasteless” in the name of “food safety”. These days, if I want a burger, I grind some beef at home and cook it myself. That way I know it came from a real steak and that the grinder has been cleaned well between uses (hot water, soap, and then bleach-water).
When I go to a restaurant the knows what they are doing I’ll order a steak, and tell the server to have the chef cook it what he feels is “perfection”.
I haven been disappointed yet.
Interestingly, I’ve read the opposite- that due to the more abundant intramuscular fat of a Choice or Prime steak, it can stand being cooked a little more done than a Select or lower grade steak that’s probably leaner.
For me, all steak, except flank and London broil, should be rare to medium rare. Flank and London broil should be rare, in my opinion.
I do have a thin cut top round steak in the freezer that I’m at a loss as to what to do with, though - help, anyone? Would it work in something like fajitas if I kept it as rare as possible or should this be more braised/cooked longer? It came in a twin pack and I used the first one to do a braised meat and carrots and sherry dish that cooked for awhile - I was not happy with the results. 
That’s interesting, and quite different from my experience, in where lean badly marbled steaks are chewy and shoe-leathery when cooked rare or eaten raw, while prime or at least choice dry-aged steaks are buttery and practically melt in your mouth when raw.
Chronos, You’ve made this assertion twice in this thread and in my experience I’ve never seen this with anything other than smoked and/or basted meats. Do you cook the meat yourself? If so, I’d like to know your method.
When I make steaks (ribeye) at home my wife prefers her’s well done while my kids and I prefer medium rare. My wife’s steak is most often a little tougher than ours. In fact, I usually cook for her the best (most marbled) steak because it has more fat and has the best chance of not drying out and toughening up due to the fat content keeping the meat juicy.