How do you like your meat cooked?

[angus]

Do Americans have no taste in food or something?

From my experience, it is the Europeans, (well maybe just the British and Irish) who have a tendency to absolutely ruin the meat by overcooking.

I like realistic's answer- steaks rare and burgers medium rare.

That's not it.  Or it's simply not the most appropriate venue in which to make the observation.

If I order a steak in the US, I order it rare.  Actually, I specify rare but warm, which I take to be what others have called "somewhere between rare and medium rare."  (I voted rare for the thread.)  I'd also do this in Canada, Germany, Japan, etc.  But in most of the world I probably would not do that.  If you order a steak rare in China or Mexico, for example, they stare at you like you are mad.  I know this from experience.  And folks from the developing world generally, in my experience, think it a very strange thing for anyone to want uncooked or undercooked meat.

As for taste, warm is always more intense than cold.  It's a complicated dance between the thermodynamics and kinetics of the molecular interactions between tongue and food, but basically warmer foods, whether delicious or nasty, will have more intense flavor than the same food served cold.  This is why soft-serve ice cream took off in the 50s.  It allowed for all the weird ice cream flavors to be served at a temperature at which one's taste buds could more fully access them. 

If one wanted to intelligently comment about the lack of taste among North Americans, or Westerners in general, a thread about having cola and beer served "ice cold" would be a more appropriate venue in which to make the observation.

[angus]

Well done. Maybe that makes me a bad person, but oh well. Had rare once and I could barely chew it.

Most likely it was an inferior cut.  If you go to a place that serves really good meat, or buy the really good stuff, it melts in your mouth.   Next time you get to go to a good restaurant that specializes in good cuts of beef, try medium rare as a baby step.

If you cross-reference this thread with another recent one that wonders whether humans are a "higher form of life" than other animals, I wonder if there is any correlation.

After all, a tiger don't need no stinkin' Doyon 20-gallon capacity circle air convection oven.  As for me, I like that we have learned how to distill fermented grain beverages.  That alone is enough to stand us above the tigers.  

Still, there are folks who like their meats cooked.  Early man, even before he made his way out of the fertile valleys of East Africa, and once he got used to the immense heat given off by the burning bush after a lightning strike, figured out that the giraffes and zebras were a little easier to digest if you denature the proteins on a flame.  Certainly fajita meat, although "inferior," tastes good when cooked, and even better with a little Cholula on top.  

[angus]

You've been nipping on that flask in your filing cabinet, haven't you

haha.  Actually, it's time to restock.

I did get 'hold of some broken meat over the weekend.  It had a funk but I decided to eat it anyway.  Rare.  Big mistake.  Copious liquid evacuate the rest of the day.

There are advantages to cooking it once in a while.

[angus]

How do you like your veggies cooked?

Each should have its own individual thread, of course.  Corn and peas should be hard, but stir-fried sliced zucchini soft.  And tomatoes, in my opinion, are best raw, straight of the vine, unsalted and unpeppered.  I can go either way with serranos.  Potatoes should absolutely be as mushy as molten candlewax.  Marriage to a foreigner, particularly from East Asia, takes some getting used to in this regard.  "No, the meat should be raw; the potatoes can be stir-fried in garlic and soy sauce beyond recognition, in fact, the mushier the better.  A served potato need not be stiff! but the meat needs to still retain some red color.  How many times do we need to discuss this?"  

As for lettuce, and leafy vegetables in general, I guess I'm with the Asians on this.  Pick them, put them in a jar with acetic acid and spices, and bury them under a chickencoop for a year before serving.  No crispy leaves for me, thankyouverymuch.

[angus]

I don't even think I've ever met anyone in person who likes so-called "well done" steak.

There seem to be many in this thread.  Like you, I like my steaks (and prime rib) rare, but my wife likes all her meat cooked thoroughly, as does my sister.  It's not that uncommon. 

As you intimated, such folks don't generally order steak.  It would not occur to my wife to even order a beef steak.  It's just that sometimes you're at a wedding or whatever where there's a fixed menu, and it's prime rib or steak, and that's what you eat.  Your only choice is how much it should be cooked.  That's when folks who wouldn't ordinarily even order such a thing have to either eat it or look like a social outcast.  In those cases, they'll generally choke it down if you cook it for them.  The subtext contained in Hank's brief soliloquy isn't one of snobbery.  It simply suggests that he is sensitive enough to identify those who'd rather not be at a back-yard beef grilling festival in the first place.