There's a 25% chance your supermarket ground beef contains antibiotic-resistant fatal bacteria

[kenny blankenship]

10. If you didn't grind it yourself, cook it gray all the way through

that is the only way to be safe and sure. But it's not going to be the way to carnivore happiness.
You can grind it yourself, though, and have medium rare, juicy burgers, and still stay safe.

It's like this: the germs that cause severe food poisoning that can kill (such as virulent strains of E. Coli) come from inside the animal's intestinal tract. They don't live inside the animal's flesh. So if they somehow get on a steak, they are on the outside, not the inside, and do not spread if the meat is properly refrigerated. However when beef is ground at a processing plant, one speck of splashed-on cow crap landing on the outside of a chuck roast can infect the entire processing path and contaminate hundreds of thousands of pounds of hamburger product with potentially lethal bacteria before it is caught. Meanwhile people can be happily eating ribeyes and t-bones from the same cows at medium rare without any fears. That's because the cuts of meat that are marketed and cooked as steak will be thoroughly cooked on the outside, even though they are left pink or red inside, killing the germs on the surface where they occur. But since in ground beef products the outside has been all mixed up with the inside during processing, cooking the outside to well done is not enough, because the germs have been distributed inside and won't be killed if the meat is still below 165F at the center. This didn't used to be a big problem, but in recent decades bacteria have both risen to the challenge of antibiotics in the animals' feed and taken advantage of the unprecedented opportunity presented by the unsanitary conditions of massive factory feed lots. They have evolved in response to the environmental stimuli we've created for them. So now we have "killer" strains of E. Coli etc. which make eating hamburgers, as we knew them in our youth, into a game of Russian roulette.

The solution is to buy beef as whole cuts. like chuck roast and short ribs, dip it in boiling water for 10 seconds, which is enough to gray the outside, then cube it up and grind it. You can find lots of information on how this is done either with a food processor or a hand grinder on the internet. Following basic sanitary precautions, this will make ground beef as safe as any steak you would order medium rare at a nice steak house. And probably by grinding your own, you will also be making the best hamburgers you've ever tasted at the same time.