"steak day" news and stories

It is difficult to tell when a steak is done simply by looking at it unless you like your meat very, very rare or very, very well-done. The cooking times given in recipes, if given at all, tend to be vague because the temperatures that our grills and stoves work at can vary so widely. For example, a dial set to "medium heat"  on one stove might actually produce as large a flame as "high heat" in another kitchen. Cutting meat open once at the end of cooking isn't a big deal, but if you need to keep checking the interior of the meat, you can lose a lot of the cooking juices. The best way to check if the meat is done is by using a meat thermometer (125F for rare, 135F for medium, and 155F for well-done, according to Real Simple), but you can also use your hand as a reference and determine the doneness from the firmness of the meat.

I labeled a diagram of a hand, above, to identify the reference points. Simply press the labeled spots on your hand. They correspond with the following levels of doneness:

1. Rare meat should feel soft and offer little resistance to pressure.
2. Medium meat should feel firm, but with a little bit of give to it. The less give, the more well-done the piece will be.
3. Well done meat should also feel firm, but will have only minimal give to it.

Source

Perhaps it's the start of the summer grilling season, but we're getting hungry here at Slashfood. And sometimes nothing satisfies quite as much as a nice, thick, juicy steak. Of course, we're not crazy enough to steal any steaks, but we do get a little excited at the possibilities that steak has to offer. After all, we're not about to limit ourselves to a simple t-bone when there are hundreds, thousands of different and delicious dishes that can be made with different cuts of everyone's favorite red meat, from cheese steak to dirty steak.

On Tuesday, May 30th, we'll be celebrating our love of red meat by cooking up some sizzling steak dishes of our own, but we'd also like to see what you're doing with your steaks. If you have a food blog, post an entry and submit a link to us.

If you're looking for somewhere to start beefing up your knowledge about steak, you can learn about the different grades of beef or the leanest cuts. Otherwise you'll just have to wait until we post the roundup.