3 ms·

So if the USDA recommends this, what's the reasoning behind allowing restaurants to sell rare steaks?

• sokoloff 4y ago
  They recommend 145°F, which is medium-well. Experiential outcomes suggest pretty strongly to me that forcing all steak to be cooked medium-well or greater is wildly overly conservative.
  • jaywalk 4y ago
    There's also steak tartare, which isn't cooked at all.
  • LtWorf 4y ago
    > Experiential outcomes suggest pretty strongly to me that forcing all steak to be cooked medium-well or greater is wildly overly conservative. Do you mean you grew coltures of bacteria from various levels of cooking and compared? Was this work peer reviewed?
    • sokoloff 4y ago
      I do not mean that. (That would be experimental rather than experiential.) Order of magnitude, ~15% of beef consumed is quality steak cuts. US residents on average eats 67 pounds of beef (so 10 pounds of steak) per year. If eating steak cooked less than medium-well was dangerous in a practical/meaningful sense, it would be common knowledge (based on lived experience) that steak should be catastrophically over-cooked as a food safety measure.
• ncallaway 4y ago
  Look at almost any menu in any restaurant that serves steak and you’ll find a little asterisk, and a note about the USDA’s recommendation at the bottom of the menu. The USDA has not made it illegal or unlawful to cook steak rare. They recommend against it. A lot of people like rare steak, and will pay a restaurant to prepare a rare steak. So they do.