I prefer: “Wipe it’s a** and run it through a warm room.” Don’t get to use it too much as I’m semi-vegitarian these days.*
*For me this means If I’m hungry and offered meat, I eat it, no questions asked. I only rarely buy meat and only of the free-range variety when possible. Thank you.
I think one reason why the server finds it necessary to explain what is meant by “medium rare” is that there are some genuinely clueless people who will use terms in restaurants even though they haven’t the foggiest notion of the terms’ meaning.
I once went to a nice restaurant with a large group of people. One woman told the waiter that she wanted a dry red wine, but she said “it has to be a really, really sweet-tasting one, like Mogen David.” In chatting with her, I determined that she had heard people in the movies and on TV ordering dry wine, and she thought that it “sounded sophisticated.” Want to bet that this gal didn’t know what medium rare refers to? But she might very well order a steak and just throw in the term “medium rare” because it sounds cool and status-y.
Wolfman
I guess one should expect that kind of opinion from someone named Wolfman 
OK, folks , this is why the server has to clarify.
Medium should not be pink in the center. Medium is where the pink has just finished disappearing. Medium rare is pink in the center. Rare is red in the center. If you want it purple and kinda lukewarm-to-cool in the center, order it Philadelphia Black and Blue. Or just cut to the chase and ask them to defrost it instead of cooking it.
Or not. Maybe your scheme is just fine, come to think of it, as long as I know that’s the scheme we’re using and that I have to order mine medium-well and my girlfriend, within your definitional scheme, would have to say “well done, and then flip it over and cook it that long again, and then burn it on the outside some.”
In the absence of one agreed-upon schema, the waiter has to ask, yes? In fact, it’s more to the advantage of people like Wolfman to have the waiter ask. I can send mine back (“Yes, this is what I want. However, my ancestors discovered fire back in the Pleistocene. Could you see if you can do likewise and hold this fine steak over it for a spell? Thanks…”) Wolfman, on the other hand, can’t exactly send it back to have it uncooked a little bit.
I might add that there are parts of the country where the scale is farther to the cooked end of the scale. Order your steak “rare” in parts of south Georgia and Alabama and expect it to be pink in the inside, but not red.
Hmm… I disagree with your levels of doneness and agree with Wolfman. Medium rare is traditionally not pink in the center and cooked to no more than 130F (though these days the definition extends to 145F.) There is definitely red.
The relevant guidelines from here
I have always known medium to mean pink in the center. Anything past this is medium-well, at the very least, or well-done in my book.
The last time we went to our favorite Japanese steakhouse, which has inexplicably survived in SHEBOYGAN, WI for the last twenty years, we were overjoyed to find that they had written tuna steak in on the menus. I, of course, barely let it touch the cooktop long enough to be cut up. We talked to our waitress afterward about how great it was… and she said that most people who get it order it well done.
I almost cried.
We talked with one of the owners afterward. She said that she and her husband will just chop pieces off the tuna in the back, smear some wasabi on them, and snack on them. Yummm…
After reading this thread I have to ask, doesn’t anyone go to the same restaurant twice? It only takes a few polite iterations (a little more rare than last time, thanks) to have places serve me exactly what I want with no fuss. The customer and server relationship is an ongoing process, not culminated after one visit. Unless you plan on ordering all your meals by shouting into a clown’s mouth I suggest you build a rappor with one restaurant, preferably with one server, until you hone it down to the service you want.
I tend to order my steak rare, and get it anywhere from medium rare to well-done. This makes me cry. Well, just that one time, really. After I sent it back the 2nd time. And ended up just eating bits off other people’s plates.
I was really hungry and upset that I didn’t have anything to eat.
"I’d like a wasabi steak, please, medium rare. "
“That’s light pink in the center, right?”
“No, dark green. And smear some tuna on it.”
Slightly OT: I like to go out to eat with my sister-in-law and order rare prime rib (drools Priiiiiiiime Riiiiiiiiib). She offends me by ordering it well-done, which is an abomination, so I sit next to her when I order my rare Prime Rib.
That only applies to hamburger (which is why I don’t go to the Fudruckers here anymore) and some other meats. Steaks can be made to order. For some reason I never have a problem when I order steaks medium rare.
I can remember traveling with my parents when I was 7 years old. I have always liked my meat rare…I order it black and blue=)
I ordered a steak, rare as always. The waiter brought out a medium. I was upset and complained when he came back. He took it to the kitchen and returned the exact same piece of meat. I was not amused and complained to Dad, who was waiting to see how I handled it. I complained to the waiter again, and he refused to take it back and get me a rare one. My father told him to take it back and bring me another steak. The waiter told my father that I didnt know what I liked, and would just complain and want it cooked more when it got to the table. We all got up and walked out, and dad complained to the manager on the way. We went to a [urk] mcdeath because that was the only other option open there, but the counter person took our order and gave us what we ordered without any backtalk!
I also had been known to enjoy steak tartare as Dad liked it and made it at home for us=)
aruvgan, your dad sounds like a cool guy!
In an unfamiliar restaurant, I ask, “Does the grill chef lean toward the red side, or the gray side?” If the gray side, or “I don’t know,” I order rare. If the red side, I order medium rare.
An old friend of mine, who likes to shock people, sent a “rare” steak back, and he followed the waiter back to the kitchen. He watched the chef throw the new steak on the grill. After two seconds, he grabbed it off the grill, “OK, that’s enough!” and he walked back to the table, ripping bites off the still-cold steak. :eek:
Dang if I can remember in which restuarant I saw this; but I’m fairly sure it was a steak-house of some sort.
On their menu, there was a printed description of how their chef determined the level of done-ness of steaks; from rare through well-done.
For the well-done description, only one word was used.
Burned
Why is that shocking? That’s two seconds too long if the steak is good. The only time it is necessary to cook a steak is when the meat sucks.
And I would eat steak tartare again if I felt I could trust any restaurant that far with my health.
There is a great steak place in town, Uncle Joe’s, and I always get my steaks rare because they use good beef. They come completely pink in a nice bloody juice, and they’re very tender and flavorful. Cooking a piece of meat black or brown means, at least to me, that you don’t trust the meat and need to hide the flavor.
I don’t mind iffy (quality-wise, not disease-wise) beef in a tortilla or (especially) a hamburger, but if it’s steak I want the best I can buy.
Anyway, in conclusion, there are two ways to cook good meat: Still bloody and too damned long.
I eat my steak rare or blue.
Rare is when only the outer rim is cooked, and the inside is red and bloody.
Blue is when the centre isn’t red or even purple…it’s raw.
I have never been ill from steak, cooked like that, not once.
However, I eat hamburgers medium rare or medium. The reason is that any bacteria or germs on a steak will be on the OUTSIDE of the meat, but when you mince the meat up the germs get spread throughout it. Putting steak under a hot grill so the surface of the meat is over 50 degrees centigrade for a minute will actually kill all of the bacteria on the surface. Unless the cow was sick or the meat was badly stored there shouldn’t be any bacteria in the substance of the muscle, so quickly searing the meat on each side to give me my blue steak shouldn’t cause me any problems.
I wouldn’t eat steak in a restaurant I didn’t trust, because personally I don’t like my steak any more well-done than rare, and I won’t eat it if I feel it needs to be medium for health reasons.
No, it shouldn’t, regardless of how it’s cooked. A properly cooked steak is allowed to rest, which opens up the fibers and keeps the juices where they belong - in the steak. Any steak that “blleeds” or leaks juice when you cut it hasn’t been rested, thus hasn’t been cooked properly. You don’t want those tasty juices on your plate, you want them in the steak.
When everyone here has a problem agreeing on the colour of the meat in comparison to the wording, I ask you how do you expect to get across to the server who has to tell the chef how you like your meat?
It’s there business if you really don’t like it send it back. It’s hard to be perfect and please everyone all the time!
He is … 82 years old, same s=as my mom, and they both are way too active, and not impaired at all though my mom is staring to get sort of odd…I guess sort of alzheimers onsetty. They have a computer, go online and have a dvd player they love…
My mom in particular is neat, went from Iowa farmgirl, no electricity, ploughing with horses through the depression, ran blueprints in the engineering department of Curtis Wright, to getting one of the early speach therapy degrees [that was specifically speach therapy] to seeing men on the moon, and living in the computer age. My dad went from joining the army at 16 in '39 to his 30 year retirement in '69, to being a vice president in a major chemical corporation. He survived WW2, Korea, 'Nam and didnt lose his humanity. Any military enlisted or officer [he went mustang and retired a full bird] has a serious yardstick that I measure by to compete with.
For relics from the dark ages, they are both pretty enlightened, though when I wanted to bring home a boyfriend for the holidays pre-mrAru and my mom asked what he did for a living, when I said navy seal, she sounded dubious and said she would have to ask my dad if it was ok…and we have a running joke between mrAru and my dad about the army-navy game…involving him sneaking a go army bumpersticker on our car, and us sneaking a go navy one on theirs=)
We need a little devil smily!