The risk of any one person getting sick from any one meal of raw/rare chicken is pretty small. But if you’re a restaurant that routinely serves raw/rare chicken you’re guaranteed to make some of your customers sick sooner or later.
I’ve never experimented, but I wonder what the value of “really small” is, when chickens in the US come back from tests full of food sickness-causing bacteria.(ETA: Okay, that appears to be an old story, but here’s an article from 2013 citing a Consumer Reports report.)
You’re assuming that the grinder was cleaned and disinfected regularly. The ones I saw in Africa had old meat hanging from them and flies covering all.
That link confirms what I’ve been taught, that there isn’t just X amount of harmful bacteria in every chicken, but rather some chickens have it and some don’t. If you are a member of a high-risk population, (young children, pregnent women, elderly, people with immunosuppressive illnesses, or on immunosuppressive medications), you have a high chance of getting sick if you consume undercooked chicken that has salmonella bacteria. If you are not in a high-risk population, you still have some risk.
The problem is, at least from a foodservice perspective, we don’t know which chickens are “clean” and which ones are not, and we don’t know the condition of our customers’ immune systems. So, we focus on the one variable that we can control: the cooking temperature.
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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.
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Your idea could still work if you find another way to “sanitize” the surface of the meat. Ozone, UV irradiation, some sort of salt-curring system… Hmm, a Bourbon Cured Wagyu Ribeye Burger could sell for $50 - $60… of course, you can’t patent or copyright a recipe.
Ostrich steaks also have levels of ‘doneness’, which is as/more important than beef as anything more than medium will render them almost inedible.
Do you think there’s really that much of a market for this? I think the people who like rare ground beef (like me) are already eating it, and the ones who don’t are generally squicked out by the idea of rare beef, no matter how sanitized you tell them it is. I’m sure there is a small market segment that doesn’t do pink burgers who might if you told them the burger has been sterilized or whatnot but I know that I sure as heck wouldn’t pay the premium.
It was my idea, and I was mostly joking. I recently took a trip to Monterey, CA and saw so many ostensibly frivolous businesses that looked like they charged a fortune. In health-conscious California, in a city with a lot of money, someone possibly could charge $50 a burger if they did something novel with it, like sanitizing it so it could safely be eaten raw. Why should the rolfers get all the money?
I don’t really think there’s much of a market for it, for exactly the reasons you describe. Still, there wouldn’t need to be a wide market for it if one’s goal was simply to live off of a single restaurant in an area concentrated with people who have more money than sense.
So that’s why the store I work at has the meat grinder in the cooler! I really didn’t know why they did.
There’s another reason: you cool your grinding parts because when you grind, the grinder heats up, and if it heats up too much, it starts warming the fat in the meat to a point where it doesn’t cut cleanly and just spreads and smooshes out. This adversely affects the texture of the grind. When I make sausages, I always thoroughly chill or even par-freeze my meat, as well as keep the metal grinding parts in the freezer, in order to get a nice, clean grind. It makes a big difference in the final product.
Darn it, now you’ve gone and made me hungry. :mad: 
There’s a market! There’s a market!