How to order your steak when dining out:

[MiddleFingerMom]

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[hunter]

1. That's correct.

Extremely well done, slightly carbonized, starts to get interesting again but it's probably a carcinogen.

I wouldn't trust rare from some places.

I'm not a vegetarian in the sense that I never eat animals, but I might as well be. I can't remember the last time I had a steak. It's been a few years.

[MiddleFingerMom]

2. MiddleFingerMomTom used to work in a health-food store and came CLOSE to going vegetarian...

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... but this was back when you could trust ground beef to be safe and he just could NOT go without a
rare hamburger every now and then.
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I like medium steak (though I also have it on very rare occasions). I've always found anything less to
be too much of an ordeal to chew -- but I definitely used to agree with him about hamburgers.
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[hunter]

3. Thick hamburgers cooked on a very hot BBQ. I remember that.

Burnt a little on the outside, nearly raw on the inside.

It seems like it would be risky to cook like that today.

Maybe it was risky then too.

I still have my great aunt's meat grinder. One of my brothers has my grandma's meat grinder.

They wouldn't buy ground beef from a butcher they didn't know.

[MiddleFingerMom]

4. Ground beef production has changed drastically -- they're so focussed on getting every penny...

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... from the consumer that they cut corners on the production process -- it almost reminds me of
the horrendous practices exposed by the novel "The Jungle" written in 1906 about the meat-packing
industry (I think someone wrote a similar novel about the chicken-processing industry within the
last 10-20 years or so).
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Rare steaks are usually OK because you're cooking the surfaces exposed to bacteria and such... but
those same bacteria are THROUGHOUT ground beef and there's no way to kill them by cooking except
to make the hamburger well-done.
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Pity -- rare burgers WERE really tasty.
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[lastlib]

5. If it moos at you.....

...toss it back on the grill for a couple mins....

I'm not gonna eat a steak if the vet could still save it. Jus' sayin'...............

[kcass1954]

6. When it's done kickin', it's done cookin'.

And don't even get me started on mr.k and his "tan" steak.

[Autumn]

7. Knock it's horns off, wipe it's ass and send it trotting out.

I thought the waiter was going to die when my 82 year old Aunt replied to his 'how would you like your steak cooked"

[EvolveOrConvolve]

8. Your aunt knows how good steak should be cooked!

We call it a "blue steak", and it's by far the best way to eat a steak. Unfortunately, most restaurants don't know what I mean when I ask for a blue steak (probably because the server is some college kid who thinks "steak" is a flavor at Taco Bell).

http://www.colinmcnulty.com/blog/2007/06/05/how-to-cook-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!