Meat Doneness Explained, from Rare to Well-Done

Hi, I'm Josh Ozersky, and you're watching eHow.com. I want to talk about doneness in meat. I have a steak here. I have three steaks. They're done to different doneness. I'm not going to tell you how you can tell if they're done, what the tricks are, how you cook them right, that's a whole nother show. Assume, if worse comes to worse, you could always shtup a little meat thermometer into it, whatever, and find out, you know maybe if it's exactly the right number you're looking for. I'm going by the impressionistic index that we all use as rules of thumb for what constitutes medium rare, what constitutes rare, medium and well. Now, right there behind me in the broiler, I am killing a piece of beef, killing it. That is going to be as dead as Dillinger, that's what we call well done. You know what I'm going to keep on killing it. While I kill it I'm going to show you what rare looks like because there is a real rare, there is a real medium rare, there is a real medium. They have terms that have specific meanings that are common misused. Okay, this here is rare. That's what rare looks like. This inside is cool. The outside is warm and it is a deep red, okay? This is medium rare. You could see that it is warm in the middle. It is pink, deep pink as opposed to red and it is a little resilient when you bite it. You're not like tearing through raw meat. When you eat this it's like you're eating raw meat. Okay this here, this would be medium okay? It's still pink. It's still got a little bit of juice but I mean it's basically half dead in its accoutrements. It really doesn't have that kind of vitality, that steakly essence, and the one that I'm murdering I'm going to take out now. That is what I would call medium-well, okay? And it is no pink. It's still got a little bit of juiciness to it, and then well done would be various degrees of this, and the difference between the medium-well and the medium is that this still has some juiciness left to it. The medium is just, this is just dead tissue at this point. This is like jerky. I might as well not be eating meat, I'm a vegetable now. Anyway, just to reiterate, this is rare, this is medium rare, this is medium, and this is medium-well, and the only difference being that it's medium-well because it still has got some juiciness to it. Well done, I'm not going to even show you at all. For me, this is the sweet spot. This is how I like to serve my meat. I can eat it like this if I need to. These two, basically out of my comfort zone. I'm Josh Ozersky, thank you for watching. Watch me again on eHow.com.