A favorite of fancy French bistros, steak tartare is raw ground steak mixed with shallots, capers, olive oil, mustard and a raw egg on top. If it sounds like a food safety expert’s nightmare, it is.
Home cooks know to cook ground beef to 160 degrees Fahrenheit before eating it to prevent foodborne illness, and there’s a good reason. “Beef is produced in such a way that during the slaughtering process, it’s inevitable that some of the fecal material within the animal’s intestines has touched or spread onto the raw meat,” said Bryan Quoc Lea food scientist and author of “150 Food Science Questions Answered.”
“Normally, the butchered meat is disinfected with a number of sanitizing compounds,” he explained. “But some pathogenic microorganisms found in the intestines of cattle, such as E. coli subvariant O157:H7, are very resistant to these treatments.” According to Le, it takes only a few cells of a pathogen like E. coli to survive to cause a foodborne illness, which is why cooking beef is essential to killing all potential pathogens.
Ensuring that this dish of raw meat doesn’t make everyone sick comes down to trusting the establishment to prepare it safely. Martin Bucknavagethe senior food safety extension associate at Penn State Department of Food Science, explained, “It is not that I dislike it, but it does have a higher risk of contamination from bacterial pathogens such as pathogenic E. coli. One really puts a lot of faith into the restaurant that they have prepared it in a way to eliminate any of these pathogens.”
