In the interest of fighting ignorance, with beef, you can potentially get bacteria only on the outside of a cut of meat. The interior of intact muscle is sterile, from a microbial standpoint. However, when you grind beef, it basically ALL becomes “outside”. Any bacteria that may have been on the outside of the muscle will get mixed in, so the entire thickness of a burger could potentially be infected. Yes, yes, most of the time it’ll be fine, and there’s always a crowd of internet tough-guys pointing out how they’ve eaten raw, bleeding hamburger for three hundred years with nary a bit of trouble, but the point is still true. You can be certain of the safety of intact muscle; you can’t be certain of the interior of a burger, and that’s why you need to cook it all the way through.
Chicken and (historically) pork can harbor intramuscular pathogens - salmonella with chicken and trichinosis with pork - so you should be cooking those all the way through. As has been explained already, trichinosis has been eliminated from the domestic pork supply, so pork can now be treated like beef in that respect. It should be noted, though, that wild pigs can still carry it, and there are always a few cases every now and then of hunters eating undercooked meat and coming down with it.
It’s worth noting that pork can also contain parasites such as tapeworms. Although I understand that it’s extremely rare, if not eliminated in commercial pork in the US.
Either way, I cook my pork and chicken fully. I don’t like to take chances with that sort of thing.
In my area when hunters have gotten trichinosis it has been due to bears, cougars or bob cats. Which stinks because brown bear steak is really good and it’s a shame you have to cook it well done.
Also, the grinding machinery it goes through can become contaminated, so a contaminated piece of beef can spread through however many batches are ground until the machinery is properly sterilized.
(Why couldn’t you just trim the outside of your meat before grinding, anyway, to be extra safe? I’ve never bothered, but it seems that would solve the problem.)
Places that offer medium rare burgers are (at least in theory) mitigating this risk by carefully monitoring the storage and grinding process.
After all, the biggest risk is that you grind up the meat and let it sit on the counter all night, festering with bacteria all the way through. If you take a whole beef primal, cut off some chunks to order, and grind it on your way to the grill, then you’re dealing with a pretty safe burger even if it’s cooked only part way through.
But, yes, the only way to be sure is to cook it through.
You raise an interesting point. Has anyone ever tried to make a safe, rare burger by searing a steak just long enough to sanitize the outside, then grinding it? Seems like a safer way to enjoy a rare burger, if you’re into that sort of thing.
It would mess a bit with the texture, I would think. Like I said, why not just shave off the top portion of the primal cut before grinding? Should do the same thing. That said, it seems safe enough to me however they do it now.
There’s a risk that the knife would carry bacteria onto the cut surface. Things like this have happened with cut fruit. I remember reading about a case where people got salmonella from eating melon where the bacteria were on the rind, and the fruit got contaminated when it was cut.
It’s not likely, though. Whether you’re willing to eat meat prepared in this way depends on your tolerance of risk and the health of your immune system.
TV chef Alton Brown explained the whole “rare pork will kill you” thing as being untrue since around the mid 60s or so. According to him up till then commercial farms fed pigs, well, garbage. Not just cheap feed, *literally *garbage. Consequently pork could often contain nasty pathogens. Regulations and conditions have much improved since then. It’s undoubtedly because of growing up with that restriction, but I still find even the idea of rare pork gross.
Serv-Safe Certified Chef here. Your idea sounds reasonable, but it has a lot more risk then you might. The only way to do this safely would be to sear the steak, then chill it back down to under 41 degrees before you grind it. That time spent in the “temperature danger zone” would probably allow more bacterial growth then simply grinding up the steak while keeping it under 41 for the whole process. Not to mention, more handling and more complicated preparation means a greater chance of contamination from an outside source.
You could sear the steak and grind it without cooling it, IF you consume it or discard it within 6 hours of searing. However, putting warm meat through a meat grinder will give your burger an unpleasant texture. There is no way a restaurant could do this, but you could try it at home.
The safest way to enjoy a rare burger is to follow the time and temperature guidlines: store the beef under 41. Grind the beef, keeping it under 41 the whole time. Store the prepared patties under 41 for no more than 7 days. Consume or discard the undercooked beef within 6 hours of the start of cooking (or cool and refrigerate within 4 hours).
The trickiest is Tuna. It needs a pro as far as it goes for me. I tried it once and i ended up using it for the best tuna salad sandwich I ever had, or at least the most expensive, the next day.
And then you have steak tartare, which is raw ground beef mixed with raw egg (among other ingredients). For those who feel that raw beef is not risky enough. My wife loves the stuff.
Many years ago, I was working as a waiter at a run-of-the-mill restaurant in Minneapolis, and I had a regular customer who must have been from India or Pakistan. He would habitually come in around four in the morning (I don’t know if he was just an early riser or if he worked the graveyard shift) and order half a chicken “cooked very rare.”
I always wondered if this was a South Asian thing, and why the hell he never fell deathly ill from eating such fare.
Ah, I figured that my theoretical sear/grind wasn’t practiced in restaurants because it wasn’t practical. Hadn’t considered exactly how impractical, though. Thank you very much for your post. Ignorance fought!
And here I thought I might have given a million-dollar idea away on a message board. I was about to move to Monterey, CA and charge $50 a plate for my patented sear-ground burgers.
I used to eat steak tartare in Mozambique - not exactly a country known for its stringent and well-enforced food safety laws. Nothing bad ever happened to me, but in retrospect I think I was nuts.
I’ll go out on a limb here and say that people paying $50 for a burger are in the market for fiction anyway. Give them the option of beef or unicorn meat while you’re at it, and assure them your meat is gluten-free.
ISTR that one of the scientific cooking gurus (Harold McGee, I think) recommends essentially blanching the primal in boiling water for a short period (30-60 seconds, IIRC), and then grinding it.
The theory being that the brief boil will kill any bad bacteria on the surface, and then you’ll grind that tiny (1-2 mm) cooked layer into the rest of the raw meat, where you won’t be able to tell that it’s there. Of course, the recommendation was to either chill it back down immediately, or grind it and cook it immediately, as most of the meat will still be at refrigerator temp and will grind fine.
