Actually, the best steak tartare is hand chopped from a top quality steak…I make it using the chinese double cleaver method of chopping. The main danger of ground meat is the surface of the beef. IF you wash the exterior surface of the slab of meat in question, in general the meat is relatively safe. The e coli actually is on the surface of the meat [because of the way carcasses are handled in factory] and gets mixed in during the grinding process.
If you bought a hand crank meat grinder, and got a good quality cut of meat, and cleaned off the outside of it, and ground it in a very clean grinder it isnt that hard to make=) or a food processer [i dont actually have a food processer, I can process food in the time it takes to get it out, set it up, do it and clean it up afterwards, so why bother=)]
How about find the picture/word combination online that best describes what you want, print it out, laminate it and keep it in your wallet? =)
I am a black and blue person, and in general a good cook recognizes that=) though I have used the aforementiond stuff like hit it on the head and scare it with a lighter…=)
Brainiac4 always orders his “the right way - Medium Rare” With that disclaimer in front of it, no one elver tells him its going to be not cooked through. (In better restaurants with better peices of meat, we (I order the same) get steak that is warm through but still red in the center. In less great restaurants (Outback Steakhouse, etc) it usually means darker pink. We, of course, prefer $30 a plate red in the center tenderloin, but pink in the center doesn’t get returned (unless we pay $30 for it).)
Hell actually that’s why I gave up on steakhouses. if I go to a butchershop I know exactly what meat I’m getting, and how to cook it perfectly my own damn self.Now If only I had an Alto-Shaam and could cook a roast as well as they can.
I enjoyed some fillet steak this w/e. Sliced. Beaten with a rolling pin. mmmm. “Run it through a warm room”? Not for me! (Not really - I love a steak but I also love carpaccio )
[QUOTE=aruvqan]
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=)
[QUOTE]
I was a lot older than 7 that time. Of course, it was extremingly frustrating dealing with a chef who apparently misheard “rare” as “well-done” twice in a row. I was hungry enough that I would have eaten the second one if it had even had the slightest tinge of pink, but I prefer not to eat shoe leather no matter how hungry I am.
Well, for me, some variance is acceptable. I’ll usually eat medium rare without a complaint, and if I’m hungry enough or in a hurry, I’ll eat medium. If I get medium-well or well-done, though, that’s not honest error, that’s complete imcompetence.
The manager in the above-mentioned situation tried to claim that the cut I’d ordered was difficult to cook rare. (I don’t remember what cut it was, but the comment pissed me off enough to remember it.) If your cooks are too incompetent to cook the food properly, fire them or don’t offer it on the menu.
My SO’s mother is notorious for overcooking fish. She’s decided to be a piscetarian with smatterings of dairy products when the soy replacement isn’t available (personally, I find the American use of soy products to be a horrific bastardization), and she mostly eats fish for the “health reasons” associated. (There’s a story in here somewhere…) Most of the time when she’s at restaurants, she’ll ask for blackened salmon. I honestly think she orders it blackened to cover up the (IMO, wonderful) taste, but there might be another reason in there somewhere.
One night she and the rest of her family are in an Italian restaurant. They have a salmon dish with either a tomato-based or a cream-based sauce. (It really doesn’t matter which for this story.) She orders it, asks them to replace the sauce with blackening seasoning* and well-cooked. It comes to the table cooked about as much as you can cook fish without having it smell funny, and she says it’s undercooked and sends it back to the kitchen… twice. After sending it back the second time, she got chewed out by both my SO and his father, who berated her for not only completely insulting the cook by undoing all his efforts at making a good and well-seasoned dish, but by sending it back to be absolutely burnt. She, of course, was pleased when it was finally burnt to the point where [by the description I heard] it was probably crunchy. Blegh.
I do imagine her being horrified if I ever end up cooking a fish dinner for her. Luckily I grew up eating properly cooked fish.
[sub]*She does this everywhere. We were at a tex-mex restaurant one time and they didn’t have blackening seasoning. She seemed quite flabbergasted and ended up ordering it plain.[/sub]
In the bad old days when I was a student waiting tables at a popular frat boy bar and grill we had a regular customer during the football season, an old ex-pro player. He was a jerk but a good tipper and he gave explicit instructions on his steak: “Fifteen seconds on each side and a hot plate.” He usually ate in so fast there was no way he could tell how it was cooked.
Too many people have different expectations of what a medium rare steak is. Also I have noticed in UK local variations over what restaurants will serve when asked for medium rare. I like my stakr to have been cooked very hot for a very short period, so the flanks are tasty and the flesh is rare. Often the best way to get this is by asking for medium rare unless the restaurant has a very hot grill.
So it is best for the restaurant to ask you to confirm what you expect from a medium rare steak if you show any signs of uncertainty, or of not being a local. They never ask about medium-well or well done steak, because anyone who has the steak cooked that much obviously doesn’t care about what they are eating (Just kiding rareophobes)
Actually, it’s pretty hard to argue that it takes more skill to not cook a steak than it does to cook it
(No kidding, the person at the grill needs to have skill and pay attention if a steak is to come out thoroughly cooked, soft, tender enough to be practically falling apart, still juicy, etc.; I suspect the reason lots of folks figure “anyone who has the steak cooked that much obviously doesn’t care about what they’re eating” is due to having had steaks the consistency of beef jerky and the taste of an old saddle placed in front of them along with a huge bottle of A-1 sauce.)
