why is it okay to eat beef/steak at a lower temperature than chicken and other meats?
In: Biology
When an animal is first slaughtered the meat is sterile. That very quickly changes because there are bacteria on everything, including the tools used to butcher meat. Those bacteria get on the surface of the meat and can only penetrate a short distance into it.
The meat on a chicken is really thin and that short distance that bacteria can penetrate into it is enough to get to the center of the meat. That means that you need to get every last bit of the chicken meat hot enough to kill off bacteria, otherwise there could be bacteria in the center that are still alive.
Cuts of beef are much thicker than chicken meat. Although bacteria can penetrate into beef the same distance that they can penetrate into chicken, on an average cut of steak that’s still pretty close to the surface. Because there are no bacteria in the center of a steak there’s no need to actually cook the center at all. As long as you’ve charred the outside, the parts of the steak where the bacteria are have all gotten hot enough to kill them off.
This is also why you need to cook ground beef to the same temperature as chicken – by grinding the meat up you distribute the bacteria throughout it, so you have to heat everything up enough to kill off bacteria, regardless of how deep into the meat you get.
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