Why restaurants undercook steak

Ordering a steak can sometimes feel like a meaty crapshoot.

One kitchen’s definition of “medium” or “rare” might not match your own or even another kitchen’s, often delivering a steak less cooked than what you thought you ordered.

To get around this, perhaps you hedge your bets: request your cut medium in hopes that it hits the table medium-rare. Knowing from experience that ordering it the way you actually like it – juicy, tender and flavourful with a nicely developed sear – often results in something more in the vicinity of “blue rare” (i.e. raw in the centre).

If you’ve ordered steak at a restaurant of late, chances are you’ve encountered just such an undercooking trend. And according to New York Post columnist Steve Cuozzo, there’s one very simple reason behind it: money.

Various meat experts – restaurateurs, chefs and distributors – told Cuozzo that the tendency is a cost-saving measure, one that has become more prevalent over the past year or so. “The norm has become (for customers expecting medium-rare) to order by a new term, medium-rare-plus, because people found their steaks were arriving undercooked — like rareplus,” Mark Pastore, president of Pat LaFrieda Meat Purveyors, told the New York Post.

If a cut is overcooked, it’s wasted. If it’s undercooked, on the other hand, it can be redeemed. Soaring beef prices make potential losses even more significant, Cuozzo writes. “Right now I’m buying choice rib-eye for around $8 a pound. It was $6 two years ago,” Pastore reportedly said. For the supreme grade, prime, he pays “around $9.50 a pound, versus $8 two years ago.”

According to Tony Fortuna, owner of NYC’s TBar steakhouse, a 24-ounce, dry-aged cut of rib-eye runs him US$34. If a customer sends it back to the kitchen because it’s overdone, “we lose money on the whole table.”

So, what’s a customer to do? Cuozzo’s team of experts disagree on the correct course of action. But in his experience, “nothing works better than to say ‘medium-rareplus,’ and reinforce it with, ‘That’s more than medium-rare but not medium.’”