Food Matters

[The Midnight Walker]

To those who asked what blue steak is;



The following is an excerpt from the first google result;

First off: What is a Blue Steak?

If you think about the difference between well done and rare, well there is just as much difference between rare and blue. It’s way beyond Very Rare. I’ve seen “blue steak” variously described as: take a cow, rip off any horns, wipe it’s arse, and throw a match on it; or my personal favourite: steak so rare, a good vet could bring it back to life!

Don’t get me wrong, a blue steak is not Steak Tartare (which is completely raw), it is cooked though of course definitions vary as to what “cooked” means when it comes to a blue steak. When I left home as a teenager, I believed a simple idiom: If it’s not brown, it’s not cooked. So whenever I had steak, I always had it Well Done. So guess what: I hated steak! I rarely (haha) ate it, as it was tough, chewy and tasteless. I couldn’t see why everyone seemed to rate a “good steak”. It all tasted the same to me: like boot leather.

Over the years though, I figured that as half the population hadn’t died by eating rare steak, maybe it didn’t kill you on contact after all! Perhaps people were right that rare steaks were “cooked”.

The following is an except from the Steak Wikipedia page (second result on google);

vocabulary has evolved to describe the degree to which a steak is cooked. The following terms are in order from least cooked to most cooked:
Raw - Uncooked. Used in dishes like steak tartare, Carpaccio, Gored gored, tiger meat and Kitfo.
Blue rare or very rare - (46?C [115?F] core temperature) Cooked very quickly; the outside is seared, but the inside is usually cool and barely cooked. The steak will be red on the inside and barely warmed. Sometimes asked for as "blood rare" or "bloody as hell". In the United States this is also sometimes referred to as 'Black and Blue' or 'Pittsburgh Rare'.
Rare - (52?C [125?F] core temperature) The outside is gray-brown, and the middle of the steak is red and slightly warm.
Medium rare - (55?C [130?F] core temperature) The steak will have a fully red, warm center. Unless specified otherwise, upscale steakhouses will generally cook to at least this level.
Medium - (60?C [140?F] core temperature) The middle of the steak is hot and red with pink surrounding the center. The outside is gray-brown.
Medium well done - (65?C [150?F] core temperature) The meat is light pink surrounding the center.
Well done - (71?C [160?F] and above core temperature) The meat is gray-brown throughout and slightly charred.
Overcook - (much more than 71?C [160?F] core temperature) The meat is dark throughout and slightly bitter.

Remember kids! Google is your friend!


EDIT: I'll throw in a link to a picture of some nice, blue steak for you curious people to fully understand. I won't post it as an image though, as some of the squeamish people here may hurl all over their keyboards if they don't like the sight of such things. http://www.colinmcnulty.com/blog/images/cooking-a-blue-steak1.jpg