Is It Safe to Eat?
Burgers are the riskiest way to eat beef because surface bacterial contamination is ground into the meat instead of being killed on contact with the cooking surface. Many foodies love medium-rare hamburgers, and to them I say buyer beware. I don’t recommend ordering a burger that way. To me, true medium is the safest way to enjoy a burger, as it is cooked enough to get delicious char on the burger without cooking out all of the juice and fat. The USDA, however, recommends cooking hamburger to 160 degrees, a doneness that unfortunately ensures all the juice and flavor will be cooked out of the meat.
Rare: 120° to 125° with a cool, red center
Medium-rare: 130° to 135° with a warm, red center
Medium: 140° to 145° with a warm, pink center
Medium-well: 150° to 155° with a hot, pinkish-gray center
| Burning For You
Fully 75 percent of the burgers we ordered came overcooked, many inedibly so. The difference between a perfectly cooked medium burger and a well-done burger can be less than a minute on the grill. The flavor and juiciness lost in that minute can take a burger from transcendent to terrible. Diners have some culpability in the overcooked burger plague. Some order a burger medium but, when it arrives correctly cooked with a warm, pink center, they get shaky and send it back as underdone. Most likely, they want it medium-well or well-done but won’t utter the words because it’s déclassé. The flipside of this is the local diner’s notorious unwillingness to send food back, so restaurants that systemically overcook may not even know it. There are other mixed messages coming in as well: Local health departments pressure restaurants to overcook, but then chefs are instructed to accommodate diners’ preferences. I also find a correlation between Latino grill cooks and overcooked burgers. In my 15 years of running kitchens I have had many great cooks from Mexico and Central America, but not one of them would ever eat pink meat. It was a cultural barrier that carried through to the plate.
RARE, INDEED
These are the fraction of tavern-style and luxury burger joints that actually delivered a burger cooked “medium” as ordered. They are a rare breed, locally.
112 Eatery
Buster’s on 28th
Capital Grille
Craftsman
FireLake
Manny’s |
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