How do you prefer your steak?

Cav...that's done it!

You've got me craving bits of dead animal - before 6am. It's gunna be a long day!

cav - thanks for the recipe. Next time I'm feeling like a roast, I'll know what to do! KP

Well, I did manage my bit of dead critter on Saturday. Not steak, but a great pork chop, cooked exactly right, at a restaurant on the eastern side of Circular Quay in Sydney, looking across the water to the Harbour Bridge, and a big storm brewing in the west, behind the Bridge. Just spectacular!

And followed this with a brilliant Sydney Symphony Orchestra concert at the Opera House. I came out just floating.

Sydney is a great city!

I did a boneless roast leg of lamb with mint sauce on Saturday. Very tasty, but I do have concern about them breeding boneless lambs. Poor things.

Yeah, those boneless chicken farms are a pretty pathetic sight too...

Easier to catch than the other ones, though.

Margo, try this: nice thick bone-in pork loin chop....make a horizontal slit in the meaty part and tuck in a nice piece of calve's liver....toothpick it up, brush on some olive oil with herbs and toss on the barbie...delicious!

I noticed Tartar and Bleu were not amongst the choices.

I've cooked tons of steaks over the last couple decades. I tend to think how a steak should be cooked depends on the quality of the meat and what cut it is.
A Select quality Top Sirloin is a heck of a lot different from a Prime quality Tender Loin.
The former, even if it's needled, will be so much meat chewing gum if it's cooked much under medium. The later should be butter knife tender if it is on the raw side of bleu.

Sadly most people choose how they want their steaks cooked more from habit than anything else. They also frequently have no idea what they are asking for when they do order. Frequently people think medium well has no pink color in it, for instance. On the other end of the spectrum is the group with all the euphimisms for bleu. They are the poor souls who end up with meat as chewy as an eraser and few of them are brave enough to ask for a little more heat.

Meat has two things in it that make it tough. Collogens and Elastins (not sure of the speling there) the Cologens will get softer with heat, chemicals (marinade), or mechanically. Those Elastins have to be removed or chopped up.
Lower quality cuts are typically needled. That means just what it implies, thousands of needles are pushed through the meat breaking up the connective tissues. Think of a pin cushion or a bed of nails.

One thing people might not be aware of is that Ecoli is generally not a problem with steak or other solid pieces of meat. the Ecoli comes from improperly gutted and cleaned animals. Unless the Ecoli is ground up into the meat it is just on the surface and even a bleu steak will have its outside cokked to at least 155 degrees. That's the minimum needed to control Ecoli.
Our Tartar friends still have to worry though.

I like steak rare. If I'm presented with one of those mythically tender cuts of beef I'll even have it bleu. But for the most part I tend to not eat steak at all anymore. If you stand in front of a giant broiler for hours at a time with the smell of cooking meat filling you nostrils, you might fel the same way.

Buzz who really is a cook

I dont care for he very tender cuts like delmonico or filet because they are almost flavorless. All our cattle are grass fed because corn fed pen beef require too much preventive medications for cough or C/D tox. Same thing with lamb, except with lamb that we are saving for ourselves we will use a corn/molasses /oat ration for finishing.
You can tell corn fed beef , its way too marbled andmuch less flavorful, however , some of our customers demand that (tenderness over flavor)and we have to tell them that such beef is not med free even though we hold back any palliatives for the last month or so before we have them shipped .

I am fond of bleu, just can't get it done right for a decent price around town unless of course, I make it myself. Correct me if I am wrong, but wasn't the original steak tartare made from ground horse meat, not beef? Darn French...first they sell us 'creme fraiche', which is not fresh cream at all, really, then they call horsemeat 'steak'....what next, try to buy up oil wells in Iraq? Oops...