Why is it okay to eat steak when it’s pink in the middle, but not hamburger patties?
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who said it isn’t or that they don’t? They serve hamburgers like that in restaurants. As long as it’s beef, you’re good to go.
What? Many burger places ask me how I want the burger cooked. I usually say medium-rare and the burger patty is very pink on the inside. Maybe you don’t go to nicer burger places? It’s not that uncommon if you go someplace that isn’t McDonalds or TGIF’s.
Wait, y’all don’t eat medium burgers?
I’ve been eating my burgers medium or medium rare for my entire life and never gotten sick from it once. Store bought bulk, restaurant burgers and fresh from a butcher. Maybe I’m just lucky but no one I know has ever gotten sick from it either. It’s pretty normal in America to eat burgers cooked medium.
No one ever explains like the person is actually five. It’s so weird.
Beef in steak form is one solid piece of meat. This makes it harder for there to be germs because they can’t get inside very easy.
Ground beef is made with parts of one cow, parts of another, and parts of another. The parts are all out together and smashed and cut and mashed up and mixed all up. So it’s different than the steak because instead of all the germs being on the outside, they’re all mixed in.
You have to cook germs very hot to kill them, and if that hotness doesn’t get inside the meat, it doesn’t do as good a job killing the germs.
I’ve been eating my burgers pink in the middle my whole life and never got sick. Are you not supposed to eat your burgers medium rare?
Chef here. Most of the answers here about the surface of the steak being the dangerous part are correct, but boy oh boy is there a lot of misinformation about why that actually is.
The bacteria that get you sick in meat originate in the digestive system of the animal. This is why in smaller animals like poultry where all of the meat is near the digestive system during the slaughtering process, every bit of meat is considered contaminated and must be cooked to avoid food poisoning. Large animals like cows however have muscle tissue so far from the digestive system that if the animal is slaughtered incredibly carefully, the meat can be eaten raw with little risk.
However the majority of cows are not slaughtered in this incredibly careful way because it is expected that the meat will be cooked and it would be a waste of time. Therefore the inside of the muscle tissue that is never exposed to potential contamination is relatively safe raw, and the outside of the cut requires cooking to make certain.
Minced meat like that used for burgers complicate things because all that surface meat gets ground together with the inside meat. The chances for potential contamination just went up hugely, and its simply safer to cook a burger completely through. Of course if you can source your mince from somewhere that can guarantee a careful slaughtering process, then it’s safe to eat your burger medium, which is what a lot of restaurants now do.
This is not, I repeat NOT, safe to do with standard mince that you buy from the supermarket. Restaurants usually have close contact with their suppliers to ensure the meat they’re serving medium is safe to eat as such. Supermarkets don’t bother, it would eat into their profits.
ELI5; Bugs in cow doodoo can get on the meat when you kill them. But the inside of the meat gets no poopy on it so its safe. But if you mix all the meat together to make burgers then the poop bugs get mixed in as well and you have to cook it all through to kill the bugs. Otherwise you’ll be the one doing poopies all night
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