#Medium steak how to

– And lastly, while well done steak is generally acceptable in English-speaking countries, it’s rare in France and some think its an abomination to cook a good steak so thoroughly. – While blue rare steak is not common or popular in most English speaking countries, in France it is. – Instead of 6 cooking levels for steak, there are 4 steak cooking levels in french that French chefs and steak eaters prefer. – Firstly, English terms like medium, medium rare, medium, and medium well don’t fit well into a traditional French restaurant’s vocabulary, because the French use a completely different vocabulary to describe the different steak cooking levels. – In France, eating steaks or any meat where you can order how much or little it’s been cooked is similar to English, but there are differences. There are 4 main cooking levels for beef and steak temperatures in french (levels of doneness) Keep that in mind as you read through the cooking levels of doneness and their temperatures. However, there is enough overlap, and the differences are usually minimal. One home cook might call a pink steak medium rare, while his or her neighbour might look at that same piece of pink steak and call it medium. There is also a bit of subjectivity when it comes to steak cooking levels.

#Medium steak how to

There are also differences in how to define the cooking level of a piece of meat which can vary by person, region and country.įor instance, rare in one country might be considered medium rare in another country. It’s mainly done by time, colour and sometimes by touch. In a busy kitchen, chefs aren’t standing over their stoves with a meat thermometer or colour chart to ensure your steak is cooked at the exact temperature that falls somewhere on the doneness scale. It will be tougher and firmer because all the fat and liquids have been cooked away.īut, no matter how streamlined this scale has become, cooking meat to your desired level of doneness isn’t an exact science. The longer you cook a piece of meat, the warmer the core temperature.įor instance, a well-done steak is thoroughly cooked with no pink or red and has an interior temperature of at least 158F or 70C. The terms used for the cooking levels or doneness levels for meat indicate how thoroughly meat is cooked, which corresponds directly with the core temperature of the meat, the colour, taste and texture. What is a cooking level, and how is it defined? There is also a sixth lesser-known level called Blue, or blue rare in English, but it’s not a popular choice in the English-speaking world. In English, there’s a standard scale of 5 different temperatures or levels of doneness for cooking steak, hamburgers, and sometimes other meats that chefs and steak eaters use. How to order a steak in France cooked the way you like it (and hamburgers too) To help you navigate this culinary terrain, here’s a guide to the various levels of doneness for beef (steak and hamburgers) in French and a handy chart that compares the temperature differences between steak levels in the English-speaking world vs the French-speaking world. Are you familiar with the different levels of doneness for beef? While terms like “medium well” and “well done” are commonly used in English-speaking countries, they don’t always translate well into French.