On Sat, 24 Dec 2016 09:20:59 -0800 (PST), trader_4
wrote:

On Friday, December 23, 2016 at 5:23:42 PM UTC-5, Hazuki Nakamura wrote:
Frank said:

Sounds like good steak, lousy cook.

Lousy cook is a given since I am a lousy cook.
Normally, I read we should grill a steak, but I don't have an indoor grill.
The kid doesn't like the "burnt" flavor anyway as he's grown up with my
baked steaks for years and he gets set in his ways.

Good steak does not have to be cooked well done.

I go by price mostly, and quality, which is a balance.

At Safeway, the steak is more expensive than at Costco, so I get it at
Costco but then I have to buy 15 pounds at a time to get the 5-dollar a
pound price for beef top loin choice grade (the butcher usually has to get
it for me as they don't have it on the floor most of the time).

I tried Costco tritip, but it was too chewy (maybe I cooked it wrong).
I don't want to get a brisket or other tough meat since I don't know how to
cook them such that they won't be chewy.

Inside of uncut meat
is sterile and bacteria on surface is destroyed by cooking.

I never know what temperature to aim for.

I generally aim for 150 degrees F, but, I'm open to whatever degrees makes
sense since the colder the better when it comes to flavor but the warmer
the better when it comes to food safety.

I don't recall any food stories where people got food poisoning
from steaks that were even done rare. Like Frank said with a solid piece
of meat, bacteria are generally confined to the outside, which even when
going for a rare temp, winds up way hotter, unless you're using sous-vide
method or something similar. The bad stories are typically with ground
beef or cross contamination. Like the big mess at Chipotle. IDK if they
ever figured out what was going on there, but all there meat has always
been well done, so I suspect it was improper handling, storage, etc of
some ingredients. Ground beef is the worst, because any bacteria can
be in all of it, so if the center winds up rare, it's not enough to kill
the bacteria.

A lot depends on who grinds the beef. Virtually all of these E-coli
things involve factory ground beef and I am sure they grind every
speck, perhaps including something that was contaminated with gut.
If this is done at the grocery store, the chance of contamination will
come from not following proper practices like not steaming the grinder
after processing chicken. Chicken is probably the dirtiest thing in a
butcher shop.