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I’m Resigned to Beef Cooked Medium
I mostly can’t get what I want, so I’ve learned to be OK with what I end up with
I searched “rare beef” and mostly what I got, other than the image above, was lots of lovely medium or even medium-well images featuring hamburgers and steaks that I would absolutely eat. Wow! I guess my transformation is complete because not all that long ago, I couldn’t stomach even looking at, much less consuming anything with a pink center. It just looked completely gross to me.
I know, I know, that’s how most people eat their burgers and steaks and I’m the weird one, but even knowing that, until recently I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. I can eat carpaccio, or tartare, no problem — but why do you want to eat something that is two different textures and two different temperatures, to say nothing of two different colors? When ads come on the TV for Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse, I kind of have to cover my eyes. It just makes me squirrely.
Before you try to tell me that medium-well-done meat is tough, I want to don my cultural myth-busting cape and point out that it’s really not. If you cook it low and slow (which they will pretty much never do in a restaurant setting), it is imminently possible to get juicy meat that is cooked all the way through.
My husband makes steak for me all the time like that at home. I do not eat steak out and about because they often want to shame you for asking for it anything beyond medium, and then still rarely cook it correctly. If it is cooked through, it will be like the shoe leather they threatened. But that’s just silly and snobbish. I’ll have my steaks cooked the way I like them at home, thank you very much.
I do, however, eat hamburgers in the wild, and getting them cooked medium-well is still often an exercise in futility. More than half the time, they come in medium, and sometimes even medium-rare. Can’t you buy these people some meat thermometers or something, because although I know that it’s hard to keep all the metaphorical plates spinning in a busy kitchen, getting meat temperature right ought to be a core skill and value.
A few years ago I requested a medium-well burger at a favorite lunch spot and got one that was clearly medium-rare. When brought to the…
