Ground beef at home and food safety
Is there any benefits to grinding meat at home regarding safety? From my understanding, the reason a cut of meat can be cooked rare is that the outside ,which may be contaminated, gets cooked fully. Whereas with ground meat, there is no "outside", so it is always recommended to cook to 160. I could pick the cut of meat to grind. Are certain beef cuts (maybe away from internal organs) considered lower risk with regards to E.Coli and other contamination?
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I will disagree with the other answer for one simple reason -- the fewer steps taken en masse, the lower the risk.
Now of course, this assumes that you're correctly cleaning your grinder, but because you're only grinding one chunk, or maybe a few chunks of meat, you only have to worry if those chunks of meat had contamination.
For a larger operation, every piece of meat that came before it since the grinder was last thoroughly cleaned could possibly contaminate the ground meat that you've purchased.
This of course assumes that the large cut of meat hasn't already been infected because of the butchering or some other earlier processing step. (such as if many butchers are then feeding into a single grinder).
Now, is the change in risk enough to worry about? Probably not, but it exists, however slightly. If you want to be really paranoid, sear the outside of a roast, then trim them off, then grind what's left. But of course, if your grinder isn't sterile, you're just shooting yourself in the foot.
They eat chicken sashimi in Japan!
If you search for rare burgers in you will see that the food standards agency in the uk released guide for catering establishments Worthing to serve rate burgers.
The key is sourcing from a farm that specifically supplies meat for raw or rare consumption.
Such as stake tartar or beef carpaccio.
Your gut is absolutely teaming with e.coli so it’s unlikley that you will get sick from common strains. Strains like O157 / shiga like toxin that can cause kidney failure are another matter.
These can be tested for in cattle to help minimise the risk.
No, it doesn't matter who makes the ground beef. The previous "outside" contaiminates all exposed surfaces in the grinder. So you get no "free pass" for grinding it yourself.
It is also not related to the cut of beef. They are all exposed to the same environment in the butcher shop, sluiced with the same water, etc., and they are all at the same level of contamination.
And as a general rule, food safety rules are meant to be followed very literally. If under some circumstances the rule does not apply, they will tell you about it right in the list of rules. When they don't say anything, you have to see it as "no exceptions".
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