Gettining your steak rare?

I'm no chupacabre, but when I order a steak, I like it rare.
It seems like do-gooders have conspired to keep this choice from actually being achieved.
Has anyone else faced this dilemma?
How have you persevered?

I don't eat much meat, but when I do order a steak...

Pittsburgh style baby.

For the uninitiated, this involves throwing the steak (prefer filet) on the hottest grill and tossing a ladle full of clarified butter over it. Much flaming ensues. Flip steak, repeat flaming, remove, serve.

Product? A black on the outside, red on the inside slice of carnivorous heaven.

Old school.

Ahu

On 2004-12-09 18:36, Gigantalope wrote:
Has anyone else faced this dilemma?
How have you persevered?

I cook it myself.

The perfect steak:

That's the Benny Weiker cut; an eighteen-ounce, center-cut, 21-day dry-aged filet mignon. Only served at Archie's Waeside, Le Mars, Iowa.

Rare is the only way to go.

Oh, there's also the 24 ounce. bone-in New York steak at the Golden Steer in Las Vegas. Mmmm.

Turn on the charm to the waitstaff, and order the steak, "As rare as you can legally serve it." Enjoy it as others at the table who ordered the same steak "rare" look dejectedly at their smaller, heavily charred husks.
One of my friends says, "Pass it over a candle on the way out of the kitchen," but that hasn't gotten remarkable results.

I like my steak rare and I only eat steak "out" locally at places that I trust to do it right (I don't eat at Sizzler very often). This is not to say I'm not open to suggestions for new places that are reccommended to me by freinds with like-minded tastes. I find that upscale steakhouses with a good reputation and a loyal following are usually the best bet for getting a good rare steak (Jilly's in Chicago springs to mind). My son and I went out for burgers and beers a few months ago and stopped into a Bollwievel restaurant here in S.D. for 1/2 LB steerburgers which we both ordered rare. The waitress returned from the kitchen minutes later and informed us that we could only have it that way if we signed a waiver which she handed us along with a pen. We just looked at each other and busted up (as we proceeded to sign our lives away). When did America become such a SCARY place?

Mmmm... I want to have dinner with The Jab!
I agree, there are some places you just don't order steak.
This is not a very scientific rule, but it seems that if an establishment can make a good drink (in my case, a Manhattan) then they also know how to properly serve a cut of meat. There are always exceptions but like Shipwreck said, you gotta look for places wit some kind of reputation or following.
Aloha,
:tiki:

Shipwreckjoey, the real problem with ground beef as apposed to steak is the extra handling causes it to have a way higher bacteria count. Not to mention the food police would shut that place down if they didn't offer you that waver. As a chef, I enjoy my steak very rare and seasoned right. I don't believe in drownding it in steak sauce. Au jus on the side is fine tho. I love it when I will go out with people to eat and they order their steak well and then complain that it's too tough.

Gigantalope,if you like it really rare,order it "blue".Basically means that it is waved near a heat source,and then served.

In college I was a cook in a steak house in Vegas and I have seen both extremes. One customer had me drop it on the grill, flip then put it on the plate. The inside had to still be cold. Another customer had me butterfly the steak, grill it with a weight on it then boil it. It had the consistency of an old boot.

Do any of you share my habit - whenever I cook a steak at home, or other cuts of meat, I almost always cut off a few slices beforehand and eat it raw - perhaps with a sprinkle of salt or pepper added. There have been a few times where it tastes so good that I eat a quarter of the steak this way.

One of my favorite appetizer dishes is served at a local Lebanese restaurant - raw lamb and various spices and oils, all mixed together. I am also a fan of steak tartare.

I'm recalling Rodney Dangerfield's insult line from Caddyshack, that goes something like "This steak is so rare that you can still see the marks where the jockey hit it with a whip."

Vern

ikitnrev, I too like raw meat, though it's not popular around here, except Ahi.

The jokey part about the waiver signing before ordering rare meat in a restaurant, is that you can't waive the right to file against a neglegent party.

(Determining if the restaurant were at fault, along with the distributor and maybe the slaughterhouse... with what-ever food poisoning you got would be done in court...probly via a large whell with Vanna White's help)

But yeah, frigginhell. Making it hard to get a rare steak. (Prime Rib is even worse if it's overcooked)

At least i it's too rare it can be sent back.

On 2004-12-09 18:42, Ku Ku Ahu wrote:

Pittsburgh style baby.

For the uninitiated, this involves throwing the steak (prefer filet) on the hottest grill and tossing a ladle full of clarified butter over it. Much flaming ensues. Flip steak, repeat flaming, remove, serve.

Actually, frying a steak in butter is old school and the best way to prepare it.

(hey, if God didn't want man to eat animals, why'd he make 'em out of meat?)

"I'm ashamed to be here, but not too ashamed to leave..."

Celebrate 'International Tiki Day' the second Saturday in August - hau'oli la tiki!

[ Edited by: Tiki_Bong on 2004-12-10 18:01 ]

I say walk it through the door, knock the horns off
And slap it on my plate.

I lived in a sort of animal house once where a friend of mine worked as a steak cutter, he would bring home 5 gallon buckets of cut offs soaking in Teriyaki.
I would put one on the grill and one in my mouth.
Oh that was sooooo good.

We also had a theory back then that the rarer the meat the more the guy liked to (I just can't think of a nice way to say what he would do to his wife or girlfriend)
eat out more often

Happy Burp Day Bax!

I love rare steaks for sure.

But my favorite kind (althouh you cannot ask that everywhere, you need to trust the restaurant) is to have it tartar :
meaning eating it raw and mixed with egg, onions, capers, sauce...
I have a good butcher that I can trust here, so I make it myself.

[ Edited by: virani on 2004-12-12 04:17 ]

My wonderful wife took me out to Ruth's Chris Steak House last night for the Birthday.
My friend had the Ribeye 16 OZ Med. rare yum
My friends wife The Filet 12 OZ Med. rare cut it with a fork.
My wife Cowboy Ribeye same as Ribeye with a little more smokey kinda flavor and the bone in med. rare AWsome flavor could not finish it.
All steaks cooked in butter served on a 500 degree plate.
OK OK my steak
22 ounce T-bone exrta rare(cold in the center) cooked in extra butter
I could not even talk until the last bite went down.
I am still floating
And if you are sitting back saying
"eating that way is just going to kill you"
Bring it on, I will die with the biggest smile on the planet.

There certainly are people who make a case that we should be Vegans...however I'm not one of em.

We got the enzyems to digest meat, we have the teeth to masticate it...the rest is sort of a set of questions you have to answer yerself.

The Steaks sound lush, and some of those photos make we want do head down I-5 with some wirecutters and a fork to Harris Ranch.

I sometimes set the BBQ on "Clean" so it gets really hot, then pop the steaks on. It seers the outside but leave the insides rather nice and almost raw.

Anbody ever have beef not grain fed in it's last days? Grass Fed tastes much different, more like Deer.

"Just bring me the whole cow. Whatever I don't eat I'll ride home."

-Denis Leary

I'm a big prime rib fan. One of the resorts in Orlando had a 2 pound prime rib on the menu.....I ate the whole thing.

I totally understand the waitress having you sign a waiver..I was a general Manager for Sizzler for 4 years. Every week we had at least one con-artist/customer complain that they were "sick" from the food they just ate. Sizzler had gone through all the safety procedures as far as handling meat, and we were VERY anal about it. Sizzler and Jack in the box had some incedents up north, and to avoid it in the future, we really went over the top with the sanitation procedures. I would have trusted those steaks completly, as I subbbed for the butcher many times, and handled the tri-tips myself.
Still, as much as we tried, we always had at least one person a week claim illness. Stupid, really...if you truly were infected it would take a few hours before the raging bloody vomiting set in! It would not happen right after you took your last bite.

With Sizzler, what happened was that the people working the salad bar were using knives that had been cutting raw meat, and then they cut melons and other fruit with the same knives..not good!

However, unless you are eating Kobe beef, I would never order any red meat raw or rare at all. it only takes one case of food poisoning for you to really appreciate a well-cooked steak! The reason? heat breaks down not only bacteria, but the added chemicals, steroids and growth hormones they feed the cows! If you eat a blood rare steak, you are consuming much more crap then you actually can see!

Personally, I think rare is disgusting..I really don't need to see blood on my plate, and think about the cow in the slaughterhouse, hanging from it's broken legs by a chain before being "processed".

But, to each thier own!

pass the A-1...